The flea palace (Penguin Books)

Shortlisted for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace is a moving and highly original novel about a group of individuals who live in the same building and who together become embroiled in a mystery.

By turns comic and tragic, The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice. 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 naive mistress whose shadowy past lurks in the building.

When the rubbish at Bonbon Palace is stolen, a mysterious sequence of events unfolds that result in a soul-searching quest for truth. "Picaresque." (Guardian). "Hyperactive and hilarious." (Independent).