“Shafak’s second novel, 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…Shafak is careful to balance the gravity of her truth-telling mission with humor, until the shocking revelations and resolutions of the concluding chapters. Her charming, smart, and profoundly involving spinning top of a novel dramatizes the inescapability of guilt and punishment, and the inextricable entwinement of Armenians and Turks, East and West, past and present, the personal and the political. By aligning the ‘compulsory amnesia’ surrounding the crimes in one family with Turkey’s refusal to confront past crimes against humanity, Shafak makes the case for truth, reconciliation and remembrance. She also tells a grandly emphatic and spellbinding story.”
-- Donna Seaman, New York Newsday (cover)

“Beautifully imagined…it’s as much family history as national history that drives this vital and entertaining novel. And it’s the powerful and idiosyncratic characters who drive the family history. An, as you hear in your mind’s ear, it’s Shafak’s vibrant language that drives the characters…This wonderful new novel carried me away. And reality was different when I returned.”
-- Alan Cheuse, The Chicago Tribune

“Worlds collide and find themselves already interwoven…there’s more going on than interfamilial melodrama, and Shafak’s ambitions do not stop with an airing of Turkey’s century-old dirty laundry…In the end, Shafak resists a tidy wrap-up. She leaves most of her characters in the lurch, abandoning them midcrisis, their dilemmas only deepened with a dose of ambiguity. But how else could she leave them? The point here – and of the ugly fuss that has greeted the book’s publication – is that the past is never finished, never neat, and never ours.”
-- Ben Ehrenreich, The Los Angeles Times

“Shafak’s writing is seductive; each chapter of her novel is named for a food, and the warmth of the Turkish kitchen lies at the center of its wide-ranging plot. The Bastard of Istanbul portrays family as more than merely a function of genetics and fate, folding together history and fiction, the personal and the political into a thing of beauty.”
-- Jennifer Gerson, Elle Magazine

“A deftly spun tale of two families – one Armenian American and the other Turkish – who are burdened by dark secrets and historical tragedies rooted in a common Istanbul past.”
-- Amberin Zaman, The Economist

“Through her characters Shafak examines how the stories we love and the stories we tell become who we are. Her writing is beautiful and meaningful and will astound you as you find the many ways to claim the story as, also, your own…This is an important book about forgetting, about retelling stories, about denial, about not knowing your past, about knowing your past, and about choosing (again and again) to start over.”
-- Sherrie Flick, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette

“A fast paced story of love, loss, and coincidence. Shafak writes powerfully of war (cultural and familial), of peace and the meaning of moral fortitude. She possesses a steady hand when it comes to creating strong female characters, and her vivid descriptions of the charms of Istanbul serve to lure the traveler…Shafak’s characters linger in the mind days after finishing the book.”
-- Patricia Corrigan, St. Louis Post Dispatch