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Metis Fiction
Novel
13 x 19.5 cm, 384 pp
ISBN No. 975-342-553-8
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Prints:
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1st Print: March 2006
8th Print: March 2006
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Download high resolution copy 
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About the Author
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Elif Shafak is one of the leading novelists in Turkey. Born in 1971 in Strasbourg, she received her PhD in political science. Her first novel Pinhan (The Sufi, 1997) was awarded the Mevlâna Award in 1998. She then published Şehrin Aynaları (Mirrors of the City, 1999), Mahrem (The Gaze) which won the Turkish Writers' Association Best Novel of the Year Award in 2000, Bit Palas (Flea Palace, 2002) and The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2004). Her essays on gender, identity, cultural fragmentation, language and literature were collected in a volume entitled Med-Cezir (Ebb and Flow, 2005). She is a columnist for two major Turkish papers and she contributes to various European and American papers, including Berliner Zeitung, The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at University of Arizona, previously she taught at the University of Michigan. Her books have been translated into various languages, her most recent novel The Bastard of Istanbul (2007) was published by Viking Penguin in the US.
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Other Books from Metis
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Pinhan (Sufi), 1997
Şehrin Aynaları (Mirrors of the City), 1999
Mahrem (The Gaze), 2000
Bit Palas (The Flea Palace), 2002
Araf (The Saint of Incipient Insanities), 2004
Beşpeşe, 2004
Med-Cezir (Ebb and Tide), 2005
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Elif Shafak
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The Bastard of Istanbul
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Baba ve Piç
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Rights sold / published by:
Dutch: De Geus
English: Viking Penguin
French: Phebus
German: Eichborn
Hebrew: Kinneret
Italian: Rizzoli
Literary agency: Marly Rusoff & Associates
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Reviews
Excerpt
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Elif Shafak’s second novel written in English, The Bastard of Istanbul, tells the tale of two families, an exiled Armenian family living in San Francisco, and the Kazancı family of Istanbul, whose contemporary stories conjoin through a marriage that brings forth a family secret that began with the 1915 troubles between the Turks and the Armenians and is later played out in the lives of their daughters today. The novel was first published in translation in Turkey and was a best-seller for over a year.
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Zeren Somunkıran, Bianet, 8 April 2006
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"With its superb composition and style, Elif Shafak's latest novel The Bastard of Istanbul takes the reader on a journey between Istanbul and San Francisco, between the present and the past and between the sacred and the profane, while skillfully tackling the sore spots of Turkish identity: the Armenian issue, patriarchy and incest."
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Hande Öğüt, Radikal Kitap Eki, 10 March 2006
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"Elif Shafak’s works revolve around nomadism, crises of identity and memory, existence and nonexistence, internality and externality, life and death, the full and the empty, nativeness, foreignness, the similarity of opposites, the integrity in division, unity and fragmentation. In her search for a cosmopolitan, heterogeneous and multi-dimensional world, for the worlds-in-between, she constructs her new novel The Bastard of Istanbul on a ‘purgatory’ where the realities that rationalism tries to divide with reassuringly impermeable boundaries are melded together. The Bastard of Istanbul is a novel that allows for multiple readings and associations with its caustic metaphors and ruthless ironies; it is a novel about memory, the forgotten, the remembered, about mysteries, reticence and secrets. A pointed narrative that cuts through nationalist and sexist ideologies…"
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Susan Isaacs
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“The characters in The Bastard of Istanbul are so alive they leap off the page to sit beside you on the couch. What women! Brave ones, silly ones, intellectuals and dopes. Whether they are in Istanbul or San Francisco, they’re your neighbors. This is the rare family saga (blessedly without schmaltz) that understands the value of both modernity and tradition. I loved the wry humor and the social observations, as well as the author putting the personal lives of her people in a larger political tableau. Elif Shafak has created a world that enlarges our understanding of our own.”
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Ariel Dorfman
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“Mixing humor and tragedy as effortlessly as her two unforgettable families blend and jumble up the many layers of their identity, Elif Shafak offers up an extravagant tale of Istanbul and Arizona, food and remorse, mysticism and tattoos, human comedy and, yes, massacres. Quite an exceptional literary feast.”
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Peter Balakian
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“As the stories of an Armenian family and a Turkish family unfold in ways that are magical, mythic, and comic, the revelations are startling, humane, and morally illuminating. From her sensuous love of cuisine to her landscapes of popular culture, Shafak holds the tensions between past and present in playful and compelling ways.”
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Whatever falls from the sky above thou shall not curse it. That includes the rain.
No matter what might pour down, no matter how heavy the cloudburst or how chilly the sleet, you should never ever utter profanities against whatever the clouds might have in store for those of us down here. Everybody knows this. And that includes Zeliha.
Yet, there she was on this first Friday of July, walking on a sidewalk that flowed next to hopelessly clogged traffic; rushing to a late appointment, swearing like a trooper, hissing one profanity after another at the broken pavement stones, at her high-heels, at the man stalking her, at each and every driver who honked frantically when it was an urban fact that clamor had no effect on unclogging jams; at the whole Ottoman dynasty for once upon a time conquering the city of Constantinople, and then sticking to the mistake, and yes, at the rain... this damn summer rain.
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