Enlightenment: A Novel - Softcover

Maureen Freely was born in the United States and grew up in Istanbul. She graduated from Harvard University and is now a journalist and a professor at the University of Warwick as well as an acclaimed translator.

Starred Review. At the start of Freely's complex, often riveting novel set in contemporary and Cold War Turkey, a journalist known only as Miss M returns to Istanbul in 2005 after a long absence at the request of Jeannie Wakefield, whose father, William, was an American spy. Jeannie hopes that Miss M will write an article to help her husband, once Miss M's lover, who's been detained in the United States and sent to Guantánamo. A few months later, Jeannie disappears, leaving behind a long letter detailing events from the 1960s. The main narrative threads—extracts from Jeannie's letter; Miss M's memories of Istanbul from that same period and her present-day account of investigating Jeannie's long-ago indoctrination into a Communist cell, which was at one point charged with the infamous but possibly apocryphal Trunk Murder—interweave toward a quietly stunning conclusion. Both mystery/thriller and mainstream literary readers will be well rewarded. Freely is the English translator of Nobel Prize–winner Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow. (May)
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