In this boldly rendered novel, a meditation on creativity in the darkest of times, Elif Shafak imagines in vivid color the life of legendary French writer Gustave Flaubert and all the women who possessed him—the fictional ones he conjured and the real ones who shaped him—particularly Madame Bovary.

Long considered one of the world’s most influential writers, Gustave Flaubert paved the way for generations of novelists to come, and no protagonist of his is more indelibly immortalized than Madame Emma Bovary, whose tempestuous-yet-quotidian existence has captured the minds of nearly two centuries of readers. But Flaubert wrote Emma into being during one of the most chaotic and transformative eras in French history, replete with war, famine, and violence, and one of his own most troubled periods, during which he faced censorship and imprisonment. With remarkable discipline, Flaubert forged onwards, unstoppably embodying the drive and need to create during times of immense personal and political transformation.

On the heels of her most successful book yet, There Are Rivers in the Sky, Shafak has given us a triumphant new tale that weaves the traditions of the European realist novel with the ethereal, twilight-tinged oral storytelling of the Middle East. It is a novel fired by the questions long haunting Shafak’s work—Who gets to speak, and what would the silenced have said?—and shot through with a transcendent lightness and sensuality, each chapter tinged with different prisms of hues that evoke the vibrancy of Flaubert’s epileptic episodes. It’s a tale suffused by that feeling which comes when you are grabbed by a story and a character and plunged into the life of another, tumbling through space and time from the reader’s present to Flaubert’s 19th-century France.

“Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” Flaubert is alleged to have said. But indeed, Flaubert was many others, and now, for the first time, these female ghosts—Flaubert’s nanny, his mistress, a corpse, a half-drawn character—finally speak, their stories pouring forth with a tenderness and agony that will renew one’s faith in the transformational power of art, even in the grimmest of times. One of the most breathtaking and inventive novels of Shafak’s oeuvre, in the vein of Colm Tóibín and Maggie O’Farrell’s literary reimaginations, this book bridges worlds—between East and West, past and present, intellectual and spiritual, real and imaginary, and even hope and despair, dancing delicately on the knife’s edge of each.