The Bastard of Istanbul

One rainy day 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 Kazanci men die in their early forties, so it is a house of women, among them Asya’s beautiful, rebellious mother Zaliha, who runs a tattoo parlour; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as a clairvoyant; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. And when Asya’s Armenian-American cousin Armanoush comes to stay, long-hidden family secrets connect with Turkey’s turbulent past begin to emerge.

Elif Shafak

was born in 1971 and is the author of six novels – most recently The Saint of Incipient Insanities, The Graze and The Flea Palace – as well as one work of non-fiction. She teaches at the University of Arizona and divides her time between the US and Istanbul. Because of the comments one of the characters makes in The Bastard of Istanbul, Elif Shafak was faced trial for ‘insulting Turkishness’. Charges against her were dismissed by the court.