Is 10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World A Novel?

Late-night reading turned into a small revelation for me when I finished '10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World'. The novel follows Tequila Leila — a woman from the margins of Istanbul — who is murdered, and then the story gives us her consciousness for ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds after death. During that brief time her brain continues to recall memories tied to senses: tastes, smells, sounds and textures that unlock whole chapters of her life, so the book shifts between the present stillness of her body and the vivid flashbacks that made her who she was. What I loved most was how each memory is both intimate and political. Leila’s childhood, friendships, betrayals, and the found family she builds on the fringes of society come alive through small sensory details — a spice, a song, a line of dialogue — and those details map a city and a culture as much as they map a life. The novel doesn’t treat her death as an isolated crime: it interrogates how society discards women like Leila, while also celebrating the loyalty of her chosen family. Reading it felt like rummaging through a box of objects that each tells a story; the structure is clever and haunting, and I left it thinking about memory, justice, and how a life is more than the moment it ends.

If you’re asking about publication specifics, '10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World' first appeared in 2019. The novel was released in the United Kingdom in March 2019, published by Viking, and it quickly became one of those books everyone in my book circles kept talking about. That spring felt like the perfect time for it to land — the prose, the melancholy, and the way it unspooled memory made for a strong debut into many readers’ feeds and weekend reading lists. The book’s momentum didn’t stop at the UK date: a US edition followed a few months later, bringing the story to an even wider audience. It was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year, which I think helped cement its reputation as a standout work of contemporary fiction. Personally, I found its structure and voice unforgettable; the way Shafak threads life, memory, and the city together stayed with me well after I finished. That particular March release felt like the start of a conversation that’s still going on in book clubs and online forums I lurk in.

If you're asking me, '10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World' was written by Elif Shafak. She’s a Turkish-British novelist whose work often blends history, mysticism, and fierce social observation. This particular novel came out in 2019 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year, which is a neat way of saying it caught a lot of critical attention fast. The book is framed around the last minutes of Leila, a sex worker in Istanbul, and how her memories unspool in the ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds after her body has failed. Shafak's prose slips easily between personal memory, city history, and political critique—so you get intimate portraits of friendship and trauma alongside vivid streetscape vignettes of Istanbul. It reads like a catalogue of lives that refuse to be forgotten, and Shafak's empathy for marginal characters is what pushes it from good to unforgettable. Personally, that blend of lyrical detail and sharp moral questioning hooked me; I found myself thinking about the friends Leila loved long after I closed the book. If you haven’t read anything by her, you might like to follow this with 'The Forty Rules of Love' or 'The Bastard of Istanbul' to see how she moves between myth, faith, and modernity in different registers. For me, this novel still sits in the corner of my brain like a song you half-know but never stop humming.

I fell into the streets of the city while reading '10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World' — the whole book feels rooted in Istanbul. The opening image is so vivid: Leila’s body in a morgue, the clock of ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds marking the last hazy moments of her consciousness, and around that core the city and its memories unfold. Most of what we experience is the city’s sensory life — crowded markets, noisy cafés, back alleys, the underside of urban life where friendships and rivalries are forged. The novel makes the city itself feel like a character. At the same time, the story keeps leaping backwards and outwards from Istanbul into other parts of Turkey. Leila’s childhood memories and family history take us to small towns and rural landscapes in the east, so the setting is a tapestry: Istanbul in the present (the morgue, the neighborhoods, the nightlife) stitched together with flashbacks to provincial life, family migrations, and the harder social realities that drive people to the margins. There’s also a faint political and historical hum beneath everything — the social tensions of modern Turkey, gendered violence, and the precariousness of people who live on society’s edges. Reading it, I felt like I was walking through neighborhoods at dusk, catching fragments of lives in shop windows and overheard conversations, and then suddenly being pulled into a different season of someone’s life. The setting isn’t just a backdrop — it’s the reason the characters are who they are, and that made the whole thing linger with me long after I closed the book.