" Vivid and entertainig...
This wonderful new novel carried me away. And reality was different when I returned. "
-Chicago Tribune

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 nineteen-year-old woman living in an extended all-female household in Istanbul who loves Johnny Cash and the French existentialists. The Bastard of Istanbul tells the story of their two families-and a secret connection linking them to a violent event in the history of their homeland. Filled with hymor and understanding this exuberant dramatic novel is about memort and forgetting- about the need to examine the past and the desire to erase it and about Turkey itself.

" The characters in The
Bastard of Istanbul are so alive they leap off the page to sit beside you on the couch. What women!... This is the rare family saga that understands the value of both modernity and tradition. "
-Susan Isaacs

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

" A 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