In One Brief Moment All Eternity

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.