The Bastard of Istanbul PDF Download

Author: Elif Shafak
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440635846
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
A “vivid and entertaining” (Chicago Tribune) tale about the tangled history of two families, from the author of The Island of Missing Trees (a Reese's Book Club Pick) "Zesty, imaginative . . . a Turkish version of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club." —USA Today 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 a nineteen-year-old woman living in an extended all-female household in Istanbul who loves Jonny 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. Filed with humor and understanding, this exuberant, dramatic novel is about memory and forgetting, about the need to examine the past and the desire to erase it, and about Turkey itself.

Author: Aysegül Savas
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593330536
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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A "marvelous" (Lauren Groff) and "gentle, mysterious and profound” (Marina Abramović) novel about a woman who has come undone. A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio. In their meetings on the stairs, in the studio, at the corner café, the kitchen at dawn, Agnes tells stories of her youth, her family, her marriage, and ideas for her art - which is always just about to be created. As the months pass, it becomes clear that Agnes might not have a place to return to. The student is increasingly aware of Agnes's disintegration. Her stories are frenetic; her art scattered and unfinished, white paint on a white canvas. What emerges is the menacing sense that every life is always at the edge of disaster, no matter its seeming stability. Alongside the research into human figures, the student is learning, from a cool distance, about the narrow divide between happiness and resentment, creativity and madness, contentment and chaos. White on White is a sharp exploration of empathy and cruelty, and the stunning discovery of what it means to be truly vulnerable, and laid bare.

Author: Elif Shafak
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 163557448X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by Bookpage, NPR, Washington Post, and The Economist A moving novel on the power of friendship in our darkest times, from internationally renowned writer and speaker Elif Shafak. In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. Her heart has stopped beating but her brain is still active-for 10 minutes 38 seconds. While the Turkish sun rises and her friends sleep soundly nearby, she remembers her life-and the lives of others, outcasts like her. Tequila Leila's memories bring us back to her childhood in the provinces, a highly oppressive milieu with religion and traditions, shaped by a polygamous family with two mothers and an increasingly authoritarian father. Escaping to Istanbul, Leila makes her way into the sordid industry of sex trafficking, finding a home in the city's historic Street of Brothels. This is a dark, violent world, but Leila is tough and open to beauty, light, and the essential bonds of friendship. In Tequila Leila's death, the secrets and wonders of modern Istanbul come to life, painted vividly by the captivating tales of how Leila came to know and be loved by her friends. As her epic journey to the afterlife comes to an end, it is her chosen family who brings her story to a buoyant and breathtaking conclusion.

Author: Elif Shafak
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 052542797X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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"During the height of the Ottoman Empire twelve-year-old Johan arrived in Istanbul to become an animal tamer to the white elephant Chota, befriend the sultan's beautiful daughter, and become an apprentice to Sinan, the empire's chief architect. As they build masterpieces, dangerous undercurrents begin to emerge, with jealousy erupting among Sinan's four apprentices"--

Author: Elif Shafak
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141961384
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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A beautiful and compelling novel, Elif Shafak's The Gaze considers the damage which can be inflicted by our simple desire to look at others "I didn't say anything. I didn't return his smiles. I looked at him in the wide mirror in front of where I was sitting. He grew uncomfortable and avoided my eyes. I hate those who think fat people are stupid.' An obese woman and her lover, a dwarf, are sick of being stared at wherever they go, and so decide to reverse roles. The man goes out wearing make up and the woman draws a moustache on her face. But while the woman wants to hide away from the world, the man meets the stares from passers-by head on, compiling his 'Dictionary of Gazes' to explore the boundaries between appearance and reality. Intertwined with the story of a bizarre freak-show organised in Istanbul in the 1880s, The Gaze considers the damage which can be inflicted by our simple desire to look at others. "Beautifully evoked" - The Times "Original and Compelling" - TLS "Plays with ideas of beauty and ugliness like they're Rubik's cubes" - Helen Oyeyemi "Entertaining and affecting" - Publishers' Weekly Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love and is the most widely read female novelist in Turkey. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is a contributor for The Telegraph, Guardian and the New York Times and her TED talk on the politics of fiction has received 500 000 viewers since July 2010. She is married with two children and divides her time between Istanbul and London.

Author: Orhan Pamuk
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307386481
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
From the Nobel Prize winner and acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes a portrait of Istanbul by its foremost writer, revealing the melancholy that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire. "Delightful, profound, marvelously origina.... Pamuk tells the story of the city through the eyes of memory." —The Washington Post Book World A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share. With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters—both Turkish and foreign—who would shape his consciousness of his city. Like Joyce’s Dublin and Borges’ Buenos Aires, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.

Author: Elif Shafak
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101189940
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
In this lyrical, exuberant tale, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak, author of The Island of Missing Trees (a Reese's Book Club Pick), incarnates Rumi's timeless message of love The Forty Rules of Love unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz—that together explore the enduring power of Rumi's work. Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a man named Aziz Zahara. Ella is mesmerized by his tale of Shams's search for Rumi and the dervish's role in transforming the successful but unhappy cleric into a committed mystic, passionate poet, and advocate of love. She is also taken with Shams's lessons, or rules, that offer insight into an ancient philosophy based on the unity of all people and religions, and the presence of love in each and every one of us. As she reads on, she realizes that Rumi's story mir­rors her own and that Zahara—like Shams—has come to set her free.

Author: Elif Shafak
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141961376
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
By turns comic and tragic, Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice. Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartment block in Istanbul. Now it is a sadly dilapidated home to ten wildly different individuals and their families. There's a womanizing, hard-drinking academic with a penchant for philosophy; a 'clean freak' and her lice-ridden daughter; a lapsed Jew in search of true love; and a charmingly naïve mistress whose shadowy past lurks in the building. When the garbage at Bonbon Palace is stolen, a mysterious sequence of events unfolds that result in a soul-searching quest for truth. "An enchanting combination of compassion and cruelty . . . Elif Shafak is the best author to come out of Turkey in the last decade" - Orhan Pamuk "Hyper-active and hilarious" - Independent Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love and is the most widely read female novelist in Turkey. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She is a contributor for The Telegraph, Guardian and the New York Times and her TED talk on the politics of fiction has received 500 000 viewers since July 2010. She is married with two children and divides her time between Istanbul and London.

Author: Michelle Moran
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0857380737
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Paris, 1788. Marie is a young woman in love with her oldest friend and neighbour, Henri. But she is also a determined businesswoman, eager to see her family's waxwork museum keep them safe and solvent. Her gift for modelling faces in wax brings her to Versailles, where she must teach the king's sister her skill. But the coming revolution will place Marie, her family and all of Paris in grave danger. As the monarchy is overthrown and the guillotine becomes a fixture in French life, Marie is expected to show her patriotism by making death masks from the severed heads of every key figure killed as the Reign of Terror begins and France enters its darkest time. How will Marie survive the Revolution? Who will survive it with her? And just how will this girl come to be known as the woman behind one of the most famous museums in the world?

Author: Maryann Macdonald
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
ISBN: 9780761458043
Category : Children's stories
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
The reader is invited to consider some things about when, who, and how to hug and also advised to be prepared to receive one in return.