The Oracle of Stamboul

Lukas, Michael David

ISBN 10: 0062012096 / ISBN 13: 9780062012098

Published by Harper Collins, New York, 2010

About this Item

SIGNED - Octavo. Dark brown boards quarterbound in a light brown backstrip with shiny gilt lettering on the spine. Neither this book nor its dust jacket have any discernable flaws. Map endpapers. Binding is straight and tight. Pages are all clean, white, and crisp. 294 pages. Dust Jacket - is clean, bright, and sharp. First Editions Club letter from Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA tucked into the front endpapers introduces the novel.

Seller Inventory # 007051

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Oracle of Stamboul
• Publisher: Harper Collins, New York
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0062012096
• ISBN 13: 9780062012098
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Edition: First Edition, First Printing.
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Signed: Signed by the Author
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature & Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

Raised by a carpet merchant father and resentful stepmother after a prophesied birth, Eleonora is recognized as a prodigy before stowing away to Stamboul, where she charms the eccentric Sultan Abdul Amid II and changes the course of history. A first novel. (This title is being re-listed in Forecast). 100,000 first printing.

From the Back Cover

An elegantly crafted, utterly enchanting debut novel set in a mystical, exotic world, in which a gifted young girl charms a sultan and changes the course of an empire's history

Late in the summer of 1877, a flock of purple-and-white hoopoes suddenly appears over the town of Constanta on the Black Sea, and Eleonora Cohen is ushered into the world by a mysterious pair of Tartar midwives who arrive just minutes before her birth. "They had read the signs, they said: a sea of horses, a conference of birds, the North Star in alignment with the moon. It was a prophecy that their last king had given on his deathwatch." But joy is mixed with tragedy, for Eleonora's mother dies soon after the birth.

Raised by her doting father, Yakob, a carpet merchant, and her stern, resentful stepmother, Ruxandra, Eleonora spends her early years daydreaming and doing housework—until the moment she teaches herself to read, and her father recognizes that she is an extraordinarily gifted child, a prodigy.

When Yakob sets off by boat for Stamboul on business, eight-year-old Eleonora, unable to bear the separation, stows away in one of his trunks. On the shores of the Bosporus, in the house of her father's business partner, Moncef Bey, a new life awaits. Books, backgammon, beautiful dresses and shoes, markets swarming with color and life—the imperial capital overflows with elegance, and mystery. For in the narrow streets of Stamboul—a city at the crossroads of the world—intrigue and gossip are currency, and people are not always what they seem. Eleonora's tutor, an American minister and educator, may be a spy. The kindly though elusive Moncef Bey has a past history of secret societies and political maneuvering. And what is to be made of the eccentric, charming Sultan Abdulhamid II himself, beleaguered by friend and foe alike as his unwieldy, multiethnic empire crumbles?

The Oracle of Stamboul is a marvelously evocative, magical historical novel that will transport readers to another time and place—romantic, exotic, yet remarkably similar to our own.