Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Like a Sword Wound
Author: ALTAN AHMET
Illustrator: FREELY BRENDAN (TR)
Format: PAPERBACK
Publication date: 01/10/2018
Imprint: EUROPA
Price: $28.00
Publishing status: Active
Journalist and novelist Ahmet Altan has
been imprisoned in Turkey since September
2016, sentenced to life imprisonment for
sending ‘subliminal messages’ to encourage
the coup d’état attempt against the AKP
government. His manifestly unjust fate
has been widely decried both inside and
outside Turkey, and Europa’s decision to
publish his fifth novel Kiliç Yarasi Gibi (Like
a Sword Wound) in English will hopefully go
some way to raising global awareness of
Altan’s dire situation and bolster calls for his
release. The first in his ‘Ottoman Quartet’,
which spans a 50-year period in the late
19th century and early 20th century, the
novel follows the interconnected lives of
three main characters in the years leading
up to the Young Turk revolution in 1908, and
its setting, Istanbul, is evoked in all of its
beautiful and corrupt majesty.
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Volume 1 of the Ottoman Quartet
A sensual epic of a changing society set during the fall of one of history’s greatest empires.
Altan’s “Ottoman Quartet†spans the fifty years between the final decades of the 19th century and the post-WWI rise of Atatürk as both unchallenged leader and visionary reformer of the new Turkey. The four books in the quartet tell the gripping stories of an unforgettable cast of characters, among them: an Ottoman army officer, the Sultan’s personal doctor, a scion of the royal house whose Western education brings him into conflict with his family’s legacy, and a beguiling Turkish aristocrat who, while fond of her emancipated life in Paris, finds herself drawn to a conservative Muslim spiritual leader.
Intrigue, betrayal, love, war, progress, and tradition provide a colorful backdrop against which the lives of these characters play out. All the while, the society that spawned them is transforming and the Sublime Empire disintegrating.
Here is a Turkish saga reminiscent of War and Peace, written in lively, contemporary prose that traces not only the social currents of the time but also the erotic and emotional lives of its characters.
ISBN: 9781609454746
Dimension: 210mm X 134mm