PositiveThe Pittsburgh Post-GazetteAt its heart, The Bastard of Istanbul examines the difference between leaving and staying, or how the history of a place changes when people choose to leave it, choose to stay or are forced away ... Through an artfully cast, intertangled web of characters, Elif Shafak shows how Armenians abroad remember the Armenian genocide in what is now modern-day Turkey compared to those generations that remained behind...two Turkish families become crazily combined in present and past in a plot that is increasingly harder to follow... Shafak's characters freely acknowledge and discuss the 1915 Armenian genocide in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, a holocaust that Turks still strongly and officially deny ...the novel's story is connected by literature — folk stories, existential philosophy, Milan Kundera, Johnny Cash ... Shafak's writing is beautiful and meaningful and will astound you as you find the many ways to claim the story as, also, your own.
