"A murder mystery set in 16th-century Istanbul, this gripping novel is about art and religion, the encounter of East and West, and above all the question of how we deal with modernity."

"I met James Baldwin with my family in Istanbul (I think my dad was doing the music for a play he was directing). I remember his eyes—just loving those eyes. When I was old enough to read his books, I fell in love with his mind."

"Istanbul, London, Madrid, Boston…ever since my childhood I lived in numerous countries. One of the downsides of a nomadic life is that you can never keep a proper library. At some point, I had boxes of books in Istanbul, waiting to be shipped, boxes of books in Arizona. You have to let go of even your most beloved possessions when you live a peripatetic life, but there was one author whose voice I could never do without: James Baldwin—the observer, the commuter, the rebel. Notes of a Native Son is a collection of essays about language, racism, hatred, and ultimately, resilience and dignity."

"I was a student when I read Orlando for the first time, and I remember how for many days afterwards I walked around in a happy daze. Daring to transcend boundaries of gender, class, history, culture, geography…. this is a story—Woolf called it a biography—like no other. Our hero wakes up and finds himself turned into a woman, and delightfully, this transition takes place in Istanbul—Constantinople. Orlando is a novel about transformations and journeys—from man into woman, from the West to the East, from one existence to the next and vice versa."