Traces the parallel stories of unhappily married professional reader Ella Rubinstein's fascination with the story of Shams of Tabriz and the 13th-century transformation of Rumi into a mystic and poet.
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 is to change her life, and the lives of everyone around her. Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse all the Kazanci men die early in their 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 a clairvoyant; and Feride, a hypochondriac obsessed with impending disaster. And when Asya's Armenian-American cousin Armanoush comes to visit to trace her family's heritage, long-hidden secrets and Turkey's turbulent past begin to emerge.
Named Pembe and Jamila, meaning Pink and Beautiful rather than the names their mother wanted to call them, Destiny and Enough, the twin girls have very different futures ahead of them all of which will end in tragedy on a street in East London in 1978.
When Jahan travels to 16th-century Istanbul as a stowaway carrying the gift of a white elephant for the sultan, little does he know the journey on which he is about to embark. Whispers in the palace gardens and secret journeys through Istanbul lead Jahan to Mihrimah, the beautiful Princess.
