Strasbourg, Ankara, Madrid: none felt like home, but in books I discovered my people | Elif Shafak

As a child I moved from France to Turkey to Spain - then I finally found roots and belonging in stories

• In our end of year series, writers and public figures remember the place or time when they felt most at home

Where is home? The question has always intrigued and puzzled me, ever since I was a child. I was born in Strasbourg, France. Of those early years I do not remember much. Fragments of memories, like ribbons attached to a kite, drifting in the air, caught between the pull of a place and the possibility of an elsewhere.

There was a small flat, that much I know. In a high-rise building in a banlieue on the outskirts of the city. University students of multiple nationalities would cook together and hang around - Turkish, Kurdish, Lebanese, Algerian, Egyptian, Tunisian, Albanian, Greek - the smell of strong coffee, cardamom and roasted chickpeas; red wine in tea glasses, the scent of Gauloises.

Elif Shafak is a novelist and political scientist