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What others say about...
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“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 |
“The purposeful ignorance of Shafak’s Turks, born out
of a willing turning away from past familial horrors, becomes a
symbol for the collective Turkish turning away from the horrors of
the Armenian genocide. Shafak is incapable of bringing harmony to
such unsettled matters, even in the pages of a fiction narrative.
All she can do, and does, is shine a light on the past, and keep it
shining so that everyone – Turkish, Armenian, and otherwise – must
look.”
-- Saul Austerlitz, San Francisco Chronicle (front page) |
“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 |
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