The Flea Palace [Paperback]

Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartment block in Istanbul. Now it is a sadly dilapidated home to ten wildly different individuals and their families.

There's a womanizing, hard-drinking academic with a penchant for philosophy; a 'clean freak' and her lice-ridden daughter; a lapsed Jew in search of true love; and a charmingly naïve mistress whose shadowy past lurks in the building. When the rubbish at Bonbon Palace is stolen, a mysterious sequence of events unfold that result in a soul-searching quest for truth.

By turns comic and tragic, The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by a powerful sense of social justice.Picaresque charm with a touch of magic realism—Independent

An enchanting combination of compassion and cruelty . . . Elif Shafak is the best author to come out of Turkey in the last decade—

Picaresque—Guardian

A gem of a novel—Waterstones

Wonderful—Bookseller

Ms Shafak is well set to challenge Mr Pamuk as Turkey's foremost contemporary novelist—EconomistElif Shafak was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1971. She is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read female writer in Turkey. Critics have acclaimed her as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary literature in both Turkish and English. Her novels include The Bastard of Istanbul which was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. She is married with two children, and divides her time between London and Istanbul. Her website is www.elifshafak.com.GB