The Bastard of Istanbul
- Publisher : Penguin Random House
- Publishing year : January 2015
- Binding : Paperback
- ISBN : 9780241972908
- Imprint : Penguin
- Age Group : Adult
- Language : English
From the backlist of Elif Shafak, author of The Architect's Apprentice, The Bastard of Istanbul is a tale of an extraord ...
From the backlist of Elif Shafak, author of The Architect's Apprentice, The Bastard of Istanbul is a tale of an extraordinary family curse and was longlisted for the 2008 Orange Fiction Prize.
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.
Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist and the most widely read female author in Turkey. She writes in both Turkish and English and has published seventeen books, eleven of which are novels. Her work has been translated into fifty languages. Shafak holds a PhD in political science and she has taught at various universities in Turkey, the US and the UK, including St Anne's College, Oxford University, where she is an honorary fellow. She is a member of World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Creative Economy and a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
