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In One Brief Moment All Eternity
  • Published: 15 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241745465
  • Imprint: Viking Fiction
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 608
  • RRP: $60.00

In One Brief Moment All Eternity

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
20 Oct 2026
EBook
15 Oct 2026
Audiobook
15 Oct 2026
Hardback
15 Nov 2026
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The new novel from the Booker-shortlisted, internationally bestselling author

During a time of great turmoil, Gustave Flaubert created literature's most scandalous heroine: Madame Bovary. He then poisoned her with arsenic. But what if, 175 years later, Emma – and the women history overlooked – could seize the quill from his hands and tell a different story?

In One Brief Moment All Eternity is a luminous reinvention of an iconic male writer, told through the eyes of the women – real and fictional – who shaped him: a devoted nursemaid, an Egyptian dancer and a passionate, jealous lover who refuses to be forgotten. Through their voices, visionary author Elif Shafak creates both an intimate portrait of a great artist and an epic meditation on storytelling itself: who gets remembered, who gets erased, and how can literature endure through political upheaval, war and injustice? When the world feels broken, how do we find the hope to carry on?

Shafak takes readers on an extraordinary journey through time and space, from Flaubert's unusual childhood in a house that was part home, part hospital, part morgue, to nineteenth-century Paris during the Revolution, and onwards to Istanbul, Cairo, Palestine and Beirut. In this exhilarating tale, the questions at the heart of her work take on a thrilling new urgency: who gets to speak, and what would the silenced have said?

Boldly inventive, transporting and illuminating, spanning decades and continents, In One Brief Moment All Eternity is a dazzling love letter to literature, untold stories, neglected communities and the enduring spirit of humanity.
  • Published: 15 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241745465
  • Imprint: Viking Fiction
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 608
  • RRP: $60.00
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About the author

Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist, whose work has been translated into fifty-seven languages. The author of twenty books, fourteen of which are novels, she was awarded the Halldór Laxness Prize for her contribution to the art of storytelling. Shafak's previous novel, THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY, was the UK’s bestselling literary hardback novel of 2025, selling over 500,000 copies. Widely read in many countries around the world, her writing has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and Prix Femina Etranger, amongst others, and she was nominated for ‘Author of the Year’ at the British Book Awards. Elif Shafak was appointed President of the Royal Society of Literature in 2025. She was awarded the British Academy President’s medal for bravely tackling sensitive subjects and for her body of work which demonstrates an incredible intercultural range.
ES

Also by Elif Shafak

There are Rivers in the Sky
The Island of Missing Trees
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World
Three Daughters of Eve
The Architect's Apprentice
The Bastard of Istanbul
Black Milk
See all

Praise for In One Brief Moment All Eternity

Make place for Elif Shafak on your bookshelf. Make place for her in your heart too. You won't regret it

ARUNDHATI ROY

A unique and powerful voice in world literature

IAN MCEWAN

One of the best writers in the world today

HANIF KUREISHI

One of the world's most exhilirating storytellers

OBSERVER

Shafak’s imagination is a wonder: bold, capacious, beautiful and wise

KATIE KITAMURA

Shafak’s writing is poised and expressed, remarkable for its charm and lyricism

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Elif Shafak approaches the world with grace, lyricism, and courage

VIET THANH NGUYEN

Elif Shafak ties together diverse time periods and places in a way that seems both natural and wonderfully unexpected

MARY BEARD

Elif Shafak is a master storyteller

SAFIYA SINCLAIR

One of our most evocative storytellers working today

iPAPER

Elif Shafak discovers the epic in the tiny, the global in the local, the love in the loss, the history in the momentary

COLUM McCANN

Shafak is that rare alchemist who can mix grains of tragedy and delight without diminishing the savour of either

THE WASHINGTON POST

There's an elegance to Shafak's storytelling that always draws me

BONNIE GARMUS

Elif Shafak is one of the great writers of our time

PETER FRANKOPAN

Shafak is a novelist whose interest in mapping the intricately related world and its history goes beyond literary device

GUARDIAN

Shafak writes with vision, bravery and compassion

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

I read this beautiful, polyphonic, learned, deeply absorbing book in a trance of pleasure. Despite the suffering, political violence, illness, death, and cultural stupidities that shape this story of a literary hero and his tremendous, if blinkered, heroine, I closed the novel with a feeling of gratitude for the abiding power of literature and its transformative magic

SIRI HUSTVEDT 

Shafak is a skilful weaver of fiction, with a penchant for inventive framing devices

FINANCIAL TIMES

Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky was a literary sensation – and the bestselling literary hardback novel of 2025 – so the stakes are high for its successor. Luckily, IN ONE BRIEF MOMENT ALL ETERNITY does not disappoint. Its subject matter – a great man of the western literary canon – might seem at first like a departure from the epic sweep and internationalism of her recent novels, but it is full of Shafak’s signature zestful, emotionally driven writing….. Shafak restores the dignity of Gustave Flaubert, whether as the clumsy child or suffering syphilitic. She restores the women, real and imagined, who surrounded him to their rightful places as formative influences in his work. And in doing so she writes a love letter to literature that might yet, in the face of "angst, anger and AI", redeem us all

THE OBSERVER

Shafak… delights and often excels in giving voice to anyone and everyone… Shafak powerfully evokes the minute-by-minute sensory experience of a sensitive child, and then of the adult still tragically caught up in his childhood world. She is astute and often moving on the main players in Flaubert’s life... By the end, Shafak’s powers of narrative invention become a kind of bravura performance, as unexpected, splendidly unlikely connections emerge.

GUARDIAN