My Blue Peninsula is a confession that fills seven notebooks, with a final notebook left mostly empty. In them, Dora Giraud tries to explain to her adult daughters why she remains in Istanbul after escaping death at the hands of extremists, and why she risks her life to campaign for the truth about the Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian genocides, ferociously denied for a century by the Turkish state. Dora's desperate need to understand her family history is the thread that binds this story's conflicting fragments. As the direct descendant of the genocides' victims and perpetrators, she carries a tangled legacy of loss and betrayal, lies and ill-gotten gains. With this confession, she hopes to set her daughters free. But can she? My Blue Peninsula is Maureen Freely's fourth novel set in Istanbul, the city of her childhood. In each, a character from the sidelines of the preceding novel takes centre stage to probe a mystery left pending. We first met Dora Giraud in Sailing Through Byzantium as the observant daughter of a famously bohemian household who could not, then, speak the truth.
NAMED A MOST-ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE MILLIONS Set in a changing Istanbul, this rediscovered 1940s classic from a pioneering Turkish author tells the story of a forbidden love and its consequences. Raised by her grandmother in one of the famed yalıs, elegant yet crumbling, that line the Bosphorus, Celile occupies a unique space between the old world of the Ottoman Empire and the new world of the Republic. She drifts through ten years of marriage, reserved even with her husband, never tempted to stray from the safe path of respectability. And then one night, intoxicated by a soulful tango, she is suddenly seized with a mad passion for another man, whose reckless pursuit of her should offend but doesn’t. Torn between two men who want to possess her, Celile attempts to live a life true to herself, always keenly aware of the limits placed on her as a woman. In the Shadow of the Yalı marks the highly anticipated English-language debut of feminist writer and activist Suat Derviş. Her sensitive, strikingly modern portrayal of a love affair, with its frank emphasis on the influence of money, provides a fascinating contrast to classic tales of infidelity such as Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.
The Museum of Innocence - set in Istanbul between 1975 and today - tells the story of Kemal, the son of one of Istanbul's richest families, and of his obsessive love for a poor and distant relation, the beautiful Fusun, who is a shop-girl in a small boutique.
Jeannie Wakefield needs help. Her family is being held by the US authorities. M is a journalist and at Jeannie's request she returns to Istanbul to investigate. She tries to be objective, but Jeannie's husband is also M's first love.
Öteki Renkler, Orhan Pamuk’un “Pencereden Bakmak” adlı hikâyesiyle, 1980’lerin sonundan 1990’ların sonuna dek yurtiçi ve yurtdışında çeşitli dergilere yazdığı yazılardan, yaptığı söyleşilerden, günlük parçalarından, yerli ve yabancı birçok yazar üstüne yazdıklarından ve politik makalelerinden oluşan zengin bir seçki. Yazarın romanlarını sevenler için onu daha yakından tanıma, yazara yabancı olanlar içinse Pamuk’un dünyasına iyi bir giriş sayılabilecek Öteki Renkler, yıllar boyunca tekrar tekrar dönülüp okunacak bir kitap. Pamuk kişisel ve edebi dünyasını okurlarına içtenlikle açıyor... Öteki Renkler Orhan Pamuk’un çocukluk anılarından mutluluk saatlerine, romanlarını nasıl yazdığından gezi notlarına, sevdiği yazarlar ve kitaplar hakkındaki eleştirilerinden kişisel itiraflarına, şikâyetlerine, siyasi öfkelerine, kültür ve gündelik hayat konusundaki heyecanlarına uzanıyor ve yazarın yalnız romanda değil, düzyazıda da ne kadar usta olduğunu kanıtlıyor. Kaleme aldığı makalelerden, tuttuğu defterlerden, verdiği röportajlardan yapılan bu titiz seçmede, Pamuk kızı Rüya ile olan arkadaşlığını, sigarayı bırakışını, gençlik bunalımlarını, günlük hayatını, sinema zevkini, Boğaz yangınlarını, bildiği İstanbul’u, yalnızlık ve mutlulukla ilgili takıntılarını, toplumun ve kendisinin korkularını ve paranoyalarını anlatıyor. Yazar kitabında ayrıca Dostoyevski’den Tanpınar’a, Kemal Tahir’den Oğuz Atay’a pek çok yazarı ve kitaplarını tartışıyor; roman kuramı, Doğu ve Batı, milliyetçilik ve Avrupa üzerine düşüncelerini açıyor. Nişantaşı’nda geçen ve bir çocuğun gözünden anlatılan “Pencereden Bakmak” adlı uzun hikâye ile birlikte bu kitap, Orhan Pamuk’un Nobel Ödülü’ne uzanan başarılı yolculuğunda renkli dünyasına ışık tutuyor.
A spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings – for love, art, power, and God – set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order; by the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings–for love, art, power, and God–set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order. Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer's curiosity–a frozen sea these many years–leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides. No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka's motivations are not purely journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka's youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Ka's frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love–or at least a wife–that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness. Blending profound sympathy and mischievous wit, Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. But even more, by its narrative brilliance and comprehension of the needs and duties
Freelys Thema ist ädas befremdende Vorurteil gegenüber Mütternä als zentralem Problem des modernen Feminismus. Ihr frischer, herzhafter Zugriff auf Alltag und Rolle von Müttern ist zugleich ironisierender Sozialreport und enthält auch konstruktive Thesen.
This work explores why feminism comes into conflict with women who have children, and why women with children suffer when they try to put feminist ideas into practice.
Introduces Hector Cabot, a wild drunk and philanderer, who is both the catalyst and court jester to a group of displaced Americans and Europeans in an expatriate community in Istanbul
