The Flea Palace - Softcover

Elif Shafak

3.39

6,874 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0714531200 ISBN 13: 9780714531205

Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 2005

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Keen irony and humour amongst the cats and tomb thieves of Istanbul The setting is a stately residence in Istanbul built by Russian noble �migr� Pavel Antipov for his wife Agripina at the end of the Tsarist reign, now sadly dilapidated, flea-infested, and home to ten families. Shafak uses the narrative structure of A Thousand and One Nights to construct a story-within-a-story narrative. Inhabitants include Ethel, a lapsed Jew in search of true love and the sad and beautiful Blue Mistress whose personal secret provides the novel with an unforgettable denouement. Add to this a strange, intensifying stench whose cause is revealed at the end of the book, and we have a metaphor for the cultural and spiritual decay in the heart of Istanbul

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Review:

Shafak can switch from a picareque tale of a father and son's broken noses to astute observations of how strangely depair and love manifest themselves without pausing. --The Guardian

A cast of wacky flat-dwellers lends it punch and pizazz --The Independent

Shafak is well set to challenge Mr Pamuk as Turkey's foremost contemporary novelist' --The Economist

From the Back Cover:

Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

By turns comic and tragic, The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice.

Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartment block in Istanbul. Now it is a sadly dilapidated home to ten wildly different individuals and their families.

There's a womanizing, hard-drinking academic with a penchant for philosophy; a 'clean freak' and her lice-ridden daughter; a lapsed Jew in search of true love; and a charmingly na�ve mistress whose shadowy past lurks in the building. When the garbage at Bonbon Palace is stolen, a mysterious sequence of events unfolds that result in a soul-searching quest for truth.

'Picaresque' The Guardian

'Hyper-active and hilarious' Independent

Translated from the Turkish by Muge Gocek

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