The Bastard of Istanbul [Paperback]

A “vivid and entertaining” (Chicago Tribune) tale about the tangled history of two families, from the author of The Forty Rules of Love and The Architect’s Apprentice

Zesty, imaginative . . . a Turkish version of Amy Tan'sThe Joy Luck Club. --USA Today 

As an Armenian American living in San Francisco, Armanoush feels like part of her identity is missing and that she must make a journey back to the past, to Turkey, in order to start living her life. Asya is a nineteen-year-old woman living in an extended all-female household in Istanbul who loves Jonny Cash and the French existentialists.The Bastard of Istanbultells the story of their two families--and a secret connection linking them to a violent event in the history of their homeland. Filed with humor and understanding, this exuberant, dramatic novel is about memory and forgetting, about the need to examine the past and the desire to erase it, and about Turkey itself. Zesty, imaginative . . . A Turkish version of Amy Tan'sThe Joy Luck Club.
-USA Today

Shafak's writing is seductive. . . .The Bastard of Istanbulportrays family as more than merely a function of genetics and fate, folding together history and fiction, the personal and the political into a thing of beauty.
-Elle

[This] saucy, witty, dramatic, and affecting tale in the spirit of novels by Amy Tan, Julia Alvarez, and Bharati Mukherjee should prove irresistible to readers. . . . A grandly emphatic and spellbinding story.
-New York Newsday(cover)

Beautifully imagined . . . this wonderful new novel carried me away. And reality was different when I returned.
-Chicago TribuneElif Shafakis an award-winning, bestselling novelist; a champion of women's rights and freedom of expression; and the most widely read female novelist in Turkey. Her books have been translated il£§