10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World Themes & Symbols Explained

What the book is about

Themes

Who gets remembered

The novel's engine is a countdown: ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds of brain activity after death, during which Leila can still remember and be someone. Against that, the city treats her as disposable—an unidentified prostitute in a morgue drawer, a murder the police won't investigate, funeral rites denied. The friends' theft of the body is the counterargument: if institutions won't mark her life, the people who loved her will. Sinan's graveside words give the book its thesis, that we are all a short span from being forgotten, and the ending answers it by dissolving Leila into Istanbul's sounds and smells. The point: memory is not granted by the state or the mosque; it is made by the people who choose you.

Characters:Tequila LeilaSinan

The family you choose

Leila's blood family fails her at every turn: a father who celebrates her brother's birth with goat stew and pride, a brother whose circumcision makes seven-year-old Leila jealous and confused in the courtyard, an uncle whose abuse is met with family silence, a belt beating that drives her from home at sixteen. The friends she gathers afterward—Nalan, Sinan, Jameelah, Zaynab122, Humeyra—are the family that shows up. They search for her, identify her bruised body, pool their money, dig her grave. In her final seconds she sees them around the bin and feels a surge of love, knowing they are the family she chose. The book's point: kinship is an act, not an inheritance.

Characters:Tequila LeilaNalanSinanJameelahZaynab122Humeyra

Memory as the senses

Leila's life arrives in the dying brain not as a story but as sensations: the salt on her baby gums, spiced goat stew, bubbling vats of lemon and sugar, cardamom coffee, rough fabric against skin. Each sense unlocks a scene and, with it, a person. This structure does real work—it insists that a sex worker's inner life is rich, specific and worth narrating in detail, in a society that reduced her to a label on a morgue drawer. Even the closing image of her spirit in the city is sensory: the call to prayer, the smell of the sea, laughter in hidden courtyards. The point: what the body remembers outlasts what the world records.

Characters:Tequila Leila

Outcasts and an illiberal country

The five friends are deliberately marginal: a trans activist, a filmmaker, a cleaner, a dwarf brothel worker, a singer. The institutions they meet—the dismissive morgue attendant, the uninterested police, the imam who refuses rites for a prostitute, the cemetery that won't accept her—treat them and Leila as unworthy of care. Their response is to build their own rituals: a stolen body, a composed lament sung in a borrowed van, a grave dug at night. The book's point is that when a country's official structures exclude people, dignity becomes something the excluded must make for themselves, together, with their hands.

Characters:Tequila Leila

Objects that carry meaning

Symbols

Salt

The first memory: Binnaz rubbing salt on baby Leila's gums in Van to ward off evil. It stands for a mother's protection and the earliest, most elemental layer of the self—the taste that survives everything that comes after.

The purple silk scarf

A gift from an aunt, said to have belonged to a sultan's concubine, hidden under a child's pillow in Van. It carries the dream of a life beyond a small town—and, in its concubine's history, a dark hint of the fate that awaits Leila.

Jameelah's birds

Birds kept in a cramped apartment, believed to be the souls of the dead, tended with strange tenderness. When Jameelah releases them after the burial, the gesture mirrors Leila's own release—her soul freed from the body the city tried to discard.

The rubbish bin

A metal bin on the outskirts of Istanbul holds Leila's murdered body—and, in her final vision, all five friends gathered around it. It is what the city thinks of her, transformed into the place where her chosen family assembles.

Spoilers

The ending explained

The ending works on two levels at once. On the surface it is a small victory: five outcasts outwit morgue, imam and cemetery to bury their friend with their own hands, and each is changed by it—Nalan's activism, Sinan's finished documentary, Jameelah's freed birds, Zaynab122 leaving the brothel, Humeyra's recorded lament. But the final movement goes further, imagining Leila's spirit woven into Istanbul itself: the call to prayer, the smell of the sea, the laughter of women in hidden courtyards. One reading is consoling—she is not forgotten, she is everywhere. A darker reading is that only in death, dissolved into metaphor, can a woman like Leila finally belong to the city that discarded her. The title's countdown sharpens both readings: if we are all ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds from being forgotten, then remembering is not a given but a choice, made by the living, one act at a time.

Who is who

10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World characters

Every character, where they appear and how they are connected.

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