The sultan's seal
By: Jenny White.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Published: 2006
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 351
Subjects: Governesses -- Crimes against -- Fiction.; Young women -- Crimes against -- Fiction.; Police magistrates -- Fiction.; British -- Turkey -- Fiction.; Istanbul (Turkey) -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
Description: Rich in sensuous detail, this first novel brilliantly captures the political and social upheavals of the waning Ottoman Empire. The naked body of a young Englishwoman washes up in Istanbul wearing a pendant inscribed with the seal of the deposed sultan. The death resembles the murder by strangulation of another English governess, a crime that was never solved. Kamil Pasha, a magistrate in the new secular courts, sets out to find the killer, but his dispassionate belief in science and modernity is shaken by betrayal and widening danger. In a lush, mystical voice, a young Muslim woman, Jaanan, recounts her own relationships with one of the dead women and her suspected killer. Were these political murders involving the palace or crimes of personal passion? An absorbing tale that transports the reader to nineteenth-century Turkey, this novel is also a lyrical meditation on the contradictory desires of the human soul.