Love in the Days of Rebellion — Ahmet Altan

The author of Like a Sword Wound weaves an “ambitious and intelligent thriller about love and war” in the early twentieth-century Ottoman Empire (Kirkus Reviews).

Love in the Days of Rebellion is the second installment in Ahmet Altan's masterful saga of Turkish history, The Ottoman Quartet. Following the vast and vivid cast of characters introduced in Like A Sword Wound, it opens with the attempted suicide of Hikmet Bey, the son of the sultan's personal physician.

Hikmet is driven to this extreme in an attempt to forget his wife, the beautiful and proud Mehpare Hanim. While Hikmet is recovering in a hospital in Thessaloniki, slowly regaining his strength and will to live, radical changes are afoot in the Ottoman capital. The power of the sultan is eroding, a rebellion is brewing, and violence erupts on the streets of Istanbul. It is the eve of the 1909 countercoup, an event that will lead to the Empire's collapse.

With striking clarity and imaginative power, Altan evokes the traumas and upheavals of Ottoman history, showing how the events and wounds of that time still resonate in the tensions and contradictions of today's Turkey.