Bastard of Istanbul (Penguin Books)

From the back list of Elif Shafak, author of The Architect's Apprentice, The Bastard of Istanbul is a tale of an extraordinary family curse and was long listed for the 2008 Orange Fiction Prize. One rainy afternoon in Istanbul, a woman walks into a doctor's surgery.

'I need to have an abortion', she announces. She is nineteen years old and unmarried. What happens that afternoon will change her life. Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul.

Due to a mysterious family curse, all the Kaznci men die in their early forties, so it is a house of women, among them Asya's beautiful, rebellious mother Zeliha, who runs a tattoo parlour; Banu, who has newly discovered herself as clairvoyant; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster.

And when Asya's Armenian-American cousin Armanoush comes to stay, long hidden family secrets connected with Turkey's turbulent past begin to emerge. "Wonderfully magical, incredible, breathtaking...will have you gasping with disbelief in the last few pages." (Sunday Express).

"A beautiful book, the finest I have read about Turkey." (Irish Times). "Heartbreaking...the beauty of Islam pervades Shafak's book."(Vogue). Elif Shafak is the acclaimed author of nine novels including The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love and Honour, and is the most widely read female writer in Turkey.

Her work has been translated into more than forty languages and she contributes to numerous international publications, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, Newsweek and Time magazine.

She is also a public speaker working with The London Speaker Bureau and is a TED Global speaker. Elif Shafak has previously been longlisted for the Orange Prize, the Baileys Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award, and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

She is based in London with her two children.