Like a Sword Wound - Paperback

by Ahmet Altan (Author), Brendan Freely (Translator), Yelda Türedi (Translator)

A "magical, marvellous" epic of an empire in collapse: Book one in the acclaimed Ottoman Quartet by the award-winning Turkish author and political dissident (La Stampa, Italy).

Tracking the decline and fall of the Ottoman empire, Ahmet Altan's Ottoman Quartet spans fifty years from the end of the nineteenth century to the post-WWI rise of Atatu]rk as leader of the new Turkey. In Like a Sword Wound, a modern-day resident of Istanbul is visited by the ghosts of his ancestors, finally free to tell their stories "under the broad, dark wings of death."
Among the characters who come to life are 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. As their stories of intimate desire and personal betrayal unfold, 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.

"An engrossing novel of obsessive love and oppressive tyranny, a tale of collapse that dramatizes the fateful moments of an empire and its subjects."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Author Biography

Ahmet Altan, one of today's most important Turkish writers and journalists, was arrested in September 2016. An advocate for Kurdish and Armenian minorities and a central figure in the Turkish cultural world (Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk has written about his arrest and signed an open letter calling for his release), he is the author of five successful novels. The first, published when he was twenty-seven years old, won the Grand Prix from the Akademi Publishing House. In 2009 he received the prestigious Prize for the Freedom and Future of the Media from the Media Foundation of Sparkasse Leipzig, and in 2011 he received the International Hrant Dink Award. The international bestseller Endgame was his English-language debut.

Yelda Türedi was born in Mersin in 1970 and studied chemical engineering at Boğaziçi University. Brendan Freely was born in Princeton in 1959 and studied psychology at Yale University. They have been working as freelance literary translators since 2004. Among the books they have translated are, Two Girls by Perihan Mağden, The Gaze by Elif Şafak, The Eunuch of Constantinople, Leyla's House and Serenade by Zülfü Livaneli, Like a Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan, While Climbing Above the Clouds by Cem Kozlu, After Me Continuity by Akın Öngör and In the Shadow of My Eyelashes by Şebnem İşigüzel.