The Bastard of Istanbul

Nineteen-year-old Asya, like many teenagers, is full of rage. Feeling like an outsider in a family of suffocating women, she rebels against everything she thinks her family and culture expect from her. Born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, Asya is the youngest female of the Kazanci family: There’s Petite-Ma, the delicate great-grandmother slowly losing her memories to Alzheimer’s; Grandma Gülsüm, a harsh woman who must bitterly corral an unruly bunch of daughters after her only son, Mustafa, flees to America; Auntie Banu, who chooses to live with her sisters rather than her own husband and channels her piety into a career as a soothsayer; Auntie Feride, who has spent her life careening from one mental illness to the next; Auntie Cevriye, a tightly wound, widowed high school history teacher; and Auntie Zeliha, the youngest, who runs a tattoo parlor and refuses to play by anyone’s rules. Zeliha also happens to be Asya’s mother. Asya, an illegitimate child, is ignorant of her father’s identity and torn between wanting desperately to know the truth of her past and launching herself toward a future that is built independently of her unknown roots. Her conflicted feelings about the past take on more immediacy when her Uncle Mustafa’s stepdaughter, Armanoush, suddenly comes to visit. An Armenian American and a child of the Armenian diaspora who is struggling with the oppressive history of her ancestors, Armanoush hopes that by visiting the country where her family faced such sorrow and loss in the 1915 deportations and massacres, she can finally pin down her own identity. In Istanbul—a city stuck between East and West, past and future, simultaneously an inviting amalgam of stone, color, and sound and an impenetrable, deceptive façade—the two girls set in motion a series of events that uncover long-buried secrets that will link the two girls and their families together in ways no one could expect.