Where Is 10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World Set?

Walking through Shafak’s pages, I felt like I was literally walking Istanbul. '10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World' is set mainly in Istanbul — think Tarlabaşı and Beyoğlu, those neighborhoods that carry both history and hardship. The present action takes place in the city around the moment of Leila’s death and the short, intense span of her lingering memories, while flashbacks send you to her childhood in the east of Turkey and to different chapters of her life within the city itself.

Beyond geography, the novel is soaked in the social texture of 1990s–early 2000s Turkey: clashes of tradition and modernity, migration into the metropolis, the lives of people pushed to the margins. If you love novels where a city feels alive enough to hug or push you, this one nails the feeling and left me wanting to walk those streets myself later that day.

I’m struck by how firmly planted this story is in Istanbul. '10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World' starts in a morgue, and that claustrophobic, clinical moment is balanced by sprawling recollections of life across the city — the docks, the cafés, the alleys where friendships form. Those urban scenes are the backbone of the novel, but the narrator’s memories fling outward to small towns and rural areas in eastern Turkey, tracing the origins of characters who migrated to the city. So the setting is really twofold: present-day Istanbul framing the last minutes of consciousness, and scattered provincial backdrops that explain how the characters arrived there. The result is a vivid sense of place that feels both immediate and layered, and I found myself imagining both the smell of sea air and the dust of distant roads as I read.

The location of '10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World' is, in a sense, both specific and panoramic. Most concretely, it’s set in Istanbul — the novel maps out neighborhoods like Tarlabaşı and the areas around Beyoğlu, dives into the nightlife, and shows how the metropolis absorbs people from far-flung towns. But structurally the novel is also translocal: while the immediate timeline centers on the minutes following Leila’s death in the city, her recollections sweep the reader across rural eastern Turkey, family homes, and other urban stops that shaped her.

I found that duality is deliberate: Istanbul provides the arenas where Leila’s adult life unfolds, including friendships and tragedies, while her personal history illuminates wider questions about identity, gender, and economic precarity in modern Turkey. The city’s gentrification and cultural friction are almost another layer of plot, so for me the setting felt like a living archive — messy, beautiful, and stubbornly present.

I fell into '10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World' like you wander into a strange, glowing side street of Istanbul at midnight — bright, noisy, and full of lives you suddenly feel you know. The novel is planted squarely in Istanbul: its alleys, its cafés, Tarlabaşı’s rough edges and Beyoğlu’s fading glamour, the whispers by the Bosphorus. Elif Shafak uses the city itself as a memory palace, so most scenes take place across neighborhoods that feel at once historic and bruised by modern change.

The story also threads back to other parts of Turkey through the protagonist’s past — small towns in the east, family backdrops, and the social tensions that push people toward the margins. But the beating heart is Istanbul, especially its underbelly: the world of Tequila Leila and her chosen friends, the sex worker community, the noisy clubs, and the quiet corners where secrets live. Reading it, I kept picturing the city as a character that refuses to be polite, and that left me oddly moved and wide awake.

If you want a short, clear take: the novel is centered in Istanbul. '10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World' uses the city’s neighborhoods — especially the rougher, overlooked parts like Tarlabaşı and parts of Beyoğlu — as its main stage, and then spins out through memory to places in eastern Turkey where the protagonist grew up. The book’s present-day moments take place in Istanbul around Leila’s death, while the flashbacks show how the city and her past intersect.

What stayed with me was how much Istanbul itself shapes the story: it isn’t just a backdrop, it’s an active force that both shelters and punishes, and I walked away thinking about the way cities keep people’s stories tucked in their corners.

The city hits you first: when I read '10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World' I kept picturing Istanbul’s impossible mix of noise and silence. The narrative anchors itself around a specific, chilling scene — Leila in the morgue, counting down the last sparks of memory — but geographically the novel is unabashedly Istanbul-centric. That’s where most scenes and the emotional weight live, from dingy rooming houses to cafés and the particular claustrophobia of neighborhoods that watch each other. The urban setting is where margins meet the mainstream.

But it isn’t just the metropolis. The book repeatedly sweeps us back to provincial Turkey: childhood villages, extended families, the migration arcs that push people toward the city. Those flashbacks explain how characters ended up under Istanbul’s neon and shadow. There’s also a historical undercurrent — references to social change, political upheavals, and the economic shifts that shape life in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Turkey. That gives the setting depth: the city is immediate and sensory, while the past locations supply context and heart.

I kept thinking about how place defines memory in the novel; each locale casts a different light on Leila’s life, and together they make the story feel both intimate and panoramic. It left me strangely homesick for streets I’ve never walked.

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.