A vivid and entertaining (Chicago Tribune) tale about the tangled history of two families from
the author of The Forty Rules of Love and The Architect's Apprentice 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.
