Bøger i Ottoman Quartet serien

"The second installment in the Ottoman Quartet--the masterful saga of Turkish history by Ahmet Altan--follows the vast and vivid cast of characters introduced in the first volume of the series, Like A Sword Wound. The novel opens with the attempted suicide of Hikmet Bey, the son of the sultan's personal physician. The reason for his extreme gesture was to forget the extremely beautiful and proud Mehpare Hanim, his wife and the cause of all his suffering. While Hikmet is recovering in a hospital in Thessaloniki, slowly regaining his strength and will to live, radical changes are afoot in the Ottoman capital. The power of the sultan is eroding, a rebellion is brewing, and violence erupts on the streets of Istanbul. It is the eve of one of the key events that will lead to the collapse of the Empire: the countercoup of 1909."--Publisher's description.

Altan's "Ottoman Quartet" spans the fifty years between the final decades of the 19th century and the post-WWI rise of Ataturk as both unchallenged leader and visionary reformer of the new Turkey. The four books in the quartet tell the gripping stories of an unforgettable cast of characters, among them: an Ottoman army officer, the Sultan's personal doctor, a scion of the royal house whose Western education brings him into conflict with his family's legacy, and a beguiling Turkish aristocrat who, while fond of her emancipated life in Paris, finds herself drawn to a conservative Muslim spiritual leader.Intrigue, betrayal, love, war, progress, and tradition provide a colorful backdrop against which the lives of these characters play out. All the while, the society that spawned them is transforming and the Sublime Empire disintegrating.Here is a Turkish saga reminiscent of War and Peace , written in lively, contemporary prose that traces not only the social currents of the time but also the erotic and emotional lives of its characters. The female characters in Altan's gripping saga will upend prejudices about Turkey, the Middle East, and Muslim nations.