Enlightenment
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In October 2005, only a few months after her Turkish husband and five-year-old son are detained by U.S. border patrol, Jeannie Wakefield disappears. She leaves behind in Istanbul a 53-page letter revealing a convoluted tale of political intrigue, intelligence operatives and Turkish teenage radicals, of a grisly murder and a dismembered body in a trunk. It is a grim and heartbreaking history of first loves shattered and best friends betrayed. Can Jeannie be saved? Is she as innocent as she seems?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 Guant namo. 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.
