Oracle of Stamboul

Late in the summer of 1877, as the tsar's royal cavalry descends on the defenseless Ottoman outpost of Constanta, and a flock of purple and white hoopoes suddenly appears over the town, Eleonora Cohen is brought into the world by a mysterious pair of Tartar midwives who arrive only minutes before the birth. Eleonora, whose mother dies during labour, is raised by her father, Yakob, a carpet merchant, and her stern and resentful stepmother. From the moment Eleonora learns to read, her father recognizes that she is an extraordinarily gifted child, a prodigy.When Yakob sets off by boat for Stamboul on business, his eight-year-old daughter, unable to bear the separation, stows away in one of his trunks crammed with carpets. On the shores of the Bosporus, in the house of her father's business partner, Moncef Bey, a new life awaits Eleonora. Books, backgammon, sumptuous new dresses, markets, cafés and some mysterious events she cannot yet decipher. For in Stamboul in 1886, people are not always what they seem.Marvellously evocative and magical, Michael David Lukas's bestselling historical novel will transport readers to another time and place-romantic, exotic, yet perhaps not so different from our own.