Irfan Orga was born into a prosperous family in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire. His mother was a beauty, married at thirteen, who lived in the seclusion of a harem, as befitted a Turkish woman of her class. His grandmother was an eccentric autocrat, determined at all costs to maintain her traditional habits. But the First World War changed everything. Death and financial disaster reigned, the Sultan was overthrown and Turkey became a republic. The family was forced to adapt to an unima...

Irfan Orga, author of Portrait of a Turkish Family, journeys to the centre of Turkey to stay with the Yürük nomads in the High Taurus mountains. He learns their traditions, listens to their legends and lives to feel that heroes dead a thousand years and abducted princesses turned mad by grief are still palpably alive. Orga enters a world untouched by politics or the march of world events. He reconnects us with a once-ubiquitous emotional landscape – a visceral place underpinned by elementa...

Dark Journey is the disturbing, fast-paced story of a young Turkish woman's descent towards moral annihilation in the early twentieth century -one part Maupassant, one part One Thousand and One Nights. In the early Turkish republic, the options for an impoverished widow with a child are few, and the choices made by Kamelya lead to her estrangement from her son Murat. But blood ties, secrecy and fate bring them back together for a denouement that smoulders, like a Greek myth, with pent-up l...

The Nobel Prize winner and one of today's most prominent contemporary Turkish writers delivers a novel that is a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, a brilliant symposium on the power of art, and a “modern classic … rich and essential” (Los Angeles Times Book Review)—set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul.The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book ...

Afghan-American Nadia Hashimi's literary debut novel is a searing tale of powerlessness, fate, and the freedom to control one's own fate that combines the cultural flavor and emotional resonance of the works of Khaled Hosseini, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Lisa See.In Kabul, 2007, with a drug-addicted father and no brothers, Rahima and her sisters can only sporadically attend school, and can rarely leave the house. Their only hope lies in the ancient custom of bacha posh, which allows young ...

Mahmoud's passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she's ever known. But their happy, middle-class world—a life of education, work, and comfort—implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power.Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba has one hope to survive: she must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister's ...

Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes—charged with the brutal murder of her former master and sent to await execution on an isolated farm.Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution.Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at ...

#1 National Bestseller and New York Times BestsellerParis, 1878. Following her father’s sudden death, Marie van Goethem is dispatched to the Paris Opéra, where for a scant wage she is trained to enter the famous Ballet. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds work—and the love of a dangerous young man—as an extra on the stage. Marie is soon modeling in the studio of renowned artist Edgar Degas, who will immortalize her image forever, while Antoinette must make...

A New York Times Notable Crime Book and Favorite Cozy for 2011A Publishers Weekly Best Mystery/Thriller books for 2011With A Trick of the Light, Louise Penny takes us back to the deceptively peaceful village of Three Pines in this brilliant novel in her award-winning, New York Times bestselling series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache."Hearts are broken," Lillian Dyson caref...

Khaled Hosseini is one of the most widely read and beloved novelists in the world.His novels have sold more than 38 million copies worldwide. Now, six years after A Thousand Splendid Suns debuted at #1, spending fourteen consecutive weeks at #1 and nearly a full year on the hardcover list, Hosseini returns with a book that is broader in scope and setting than anything he's ever written before.A multigenerational-family story revolving around brothers and si...

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti*Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World ...

The New York Times bestselling novel from Garth Stein—a heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty, and hope—a captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life . . . as only a dog could tell it.“Splendid.” —People“The perfect book for anyone who knows that compassion isn’t only for humans, and that the relationship between two souls who are meant for each o...