The Bastard of IstanbulThe Bastard of Istanbul

A second English-language tale by the author of The Saint of Incipient Insanities finds Turkish teen Asya coming of age under the wing of her tattoo-parlor owner mother and her three aunts, befriending a cousin from America, and discovering a secret that links her family to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres.
Turkish teen Asya is coming of age under the wing of her tattoo-parlor owner mother and her three aunts, befriending a cousin from America, and discovering a secret that links her family to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres.
Asya is a nineteen-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French existentialists. She lives in an extended household in Istanbul, where she has been raised, with no father in sight, by her mother, the beautiful and irreverent Zeliha Kazanci, and by Zeliha's three older sisters: Banu, a devout woman who has rediscovered herself as a clairvoyant: Cevriye, a prim, widowed high school teacher: and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. Their lone brother, Mustafa, left Turkey many years earlier and now lives in Tucson with an American woman named Rose, who has one daughter from a previous marriage to an Armenian man. This daughter, Armanoush, is nineteen and splits her time between Tucson and San Francisco, where her father's family lives.
As an Armenian living in America, Armanoush feels that part of her identity is missing and that she must make a journey back to the past, to Turkey, in order to start living her life. She secretly flies to Istanbul, finds the Kazanci sisters, and becomes fast friends with Asya. A secret is eventually uncovered that links the two families together and ties them to the 1915 Armenian deportations and massacres.
Filled with humour and understanding, this exuberant, dramatic novel is about memory and forgetting, about the tension between the need to examine the past and the desire to erase it.