Seraglio - Hardcover

Wallach, Janet

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385490461 ISBN 13: 9780385490467

Publisher: Doubleday, 2003

Synopsis

A fictional portrait of the life of AimTe Dubucq, who was kidnapped at the age of thirteen and placed in a Turkish harem, traces her relationships with several powerful sultans and the events that led to her emergence as one of the most influential women in the Ottoman Empire.

About this title

About the Author:

A frequent contributor to publications such as The Washington Post Magazine, JANET WALLACH is the author of Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, Chanel: Her Style and Her Life, and three books on the Middle East (co-authored with her husband). She divides her time between New York City and Connecticut.

From the Inside Flap:

readers to the menacing yet majestic world of eighteenth-century Turkey, biographer and Middle East expert Janet Wallach brilliantly re-imagines the life of Aimee Dubucq, cousin of Empress Josephine, in her first novel Seraglio.

At the age of thirteen, when en route from France to her home in Martinique, Aimee Dubucq is kidnapped by Algerian pirates. Blonde and blue-eyed, the genteel young girl is a valuable commodity, and she is soon placed in service in the Seraglio - the Ottoman Sultan’s private world - in Topkapi Palace. As Dubucq, renamed Nakshidil ("embroidered on the heart") discovers the erotic secrets that win favor of kings and deftly learns the affairs of the empire, she struggles to retain her former identity, including her Catholic faith. Overtime Nakshidil becomes the intimate of several powerful sultans: wife to one, lover and confidante to another, and adoptive mother to a third. Her life often treads the tenuous line between sumptuous plea

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0385490461
• ISBN 13: 9780385490467
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 316