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The Bastard of Istanbul - Elif Shafak
The Bastard of Istanbul
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Longlisted for the 2008 Orange Fiction Prize, Elif Shafak's "The Bastard of Istanbul" is a tale of an extraordinary family curse and clashing cultural identities in the mystical and mysterious city of Istanbul. One rainy afternoon in Istanbul, a woman walks into a doctor's surgery. 'I need to... show more
Longlisted for the 2008 Orange Fiction Prize, Elif Shafak's "The Bastard of Istanbul" is a tale of an extraordinary family curse and clashing cultural identities in the mystical and mysterious city of Istanbul. One rainy afternoon in Istanbul, a woman walks into a doctor's surgery. 'I need to have an abortion', she announces. She is nineteen years old and unmarried. What happens that afternoon will change her life. Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse, all the Kaznci men die in their early forties, so it is a house of women, among them Asya's beautiful, rebellious mother Zeliha, who runs a tattoo parlour; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as clairvoyant; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. And when Asya's Armenian-American cousin Armanoush comes to stay, long hidden family secrets connected with Turkey's turbulent past begin to emerge. "Wonderfully magical, incredible, breathtaking...will have you gasping with disbelief in the last few pages." ("Sunday Express"). "A beautiful book, the finest I have read about Turkey." ("Irish Times"). "Heartbreaking...the beauty of Islam pervades Shafak's book. " ("Vogue"). Elif Shafak has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in both English and Turkish contemporary literature; her novels, "The Flea Palace", "The Forty Rules of Love", "The Gaze" and "Honour", are consistently at the top of bestseller lists across the globe. Elif Shafak's examination of national identity, "The Happiness of Blond People" is available as part of the "Penguin Specials" series - a digital only series of shorts designed with commuters in mind.
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Format: paperback
ISBN: 9780141031699 (0141031697)
Publisher: Penguin
Pages no: 368
Edition language: English
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Community Reviews
Chris' Fish Place
Chris' Fish Place rated it
5.0
In the afterword to my edition of this book, Shafak writes briefly (very briefly) that she faced charges in Turkish courts because parts of this book were considered un-Turkish. Perhaps this is not surprising considering that the novel does deal with the relationships between Turks and Armenians, an...
Stop Making Sense
Stop Making Sense rated it
3.0
The best books have a balance between language and story, between atmosphere and plot. This one came down a little too much on the side of language/atmosphere for me, for a book that's about "...a secret connection linking (two families) to a violent event in the history of their homeland." I kept t...
Stop Making Sense
Stop Making Sense rated it
3.0
The best books have a balance between language and story, between atmosphere and plot. This one came down a little too much on the side of language/atmosphere for me, for a book that's about "...a secret connection linking (two families) to a violent event in the history of their homeland." I kept t...
tymelgren
tymelgren rated it
http://tymelgren.com/books/september2013.html
say what mofos
say what mofos rated it
**********SPOILER ALERT**********The “Bastard of Istanbul” has been on my to-read radar for a while now partly owing to the review of a fellow gr friend who’s read it and to my own curiosity of how these characters are going to come together to tell the story of the Armenian genocide, and how I will...
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