Kopile Istanbula

In Istanbul, in the Kazanci family where, due to the strange fate of fate towards men, women reign supreme, Asya grows up, a young girl declared nihilist, intoxicated by Johnny Cash and French existentialists. On the other side of the world, in San Francisco, lives Armanoush, a nineteen-year-old American of Armenian origin who struggles with a sense of incompleteness in her identity. In order to find the missing link, she decides to secretly travel to Istanbul… Bastards of Istanbul is an impressive, humorous and dramatic novel about two peoples, Turkish and Armenian, and two families who are connected by a dark side from the past more than either of them can suspect. It is a novel about memory and oblivion, about the past and the present in which tradition and modernity intertwine. Elif Shafak has woven an unforgettable story about the city of Istanbul and its inhabitants, about its colors, smells and tastes, but also about the secret it hides. A bold, ambitious book... Shafak uses the familiar form of the diaspora family saga as an asbestos glove to capture the afterlife of the Armenian catastrophe. Her novel presents the necessary cast of vivid female characters, meticulously described meals, bits of folktales...