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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.

Europa Editions

Ottoman Quartet

Love in the Days of Rebellion

A “magical, marvellous” epic of an empire in collapse: Book one in the acclaimed Ottoman Quartet by the award-winning Turkish author and political dissident (La Stampa, Italy).

Tracking the decline and fall of the Ottoman empire, Ahmet Altan’s Ottoman Quartet spans fifty years from the end of the nineteenth century to the post-WWI rise of Atatu¨rk as leader of the new Turkey. In Like a Sword Wound, a modern-day resident of Istanbul is visited by the ghosts of his ancestors, finally free to tell their stories “under the broad, dark wings of death.”

Among the characters who come to life are an Ottoman army officer; the Sultan’s personal doctor; a scion of the royal house whose Western education brings him into conflict with his family’s legacy; and a beguiling Turkish aristocrat who, while fond of her emancipated life in Paris, finds herself drawn to a conservative Muslim spiritual leader. As their stories of intimate desire and personal betrayal unfold, the society that spawned them is transforming and the sublime empire disintegrating.

Here is a Turkish saga reminiscent of War and Peace, written in lively, contemporary prose that traces not only the social currents of the time but also the erotic and emotional lives of its characters.

“An engrossing novel of obsessive love and oppressive tyranny, a tale of collapse that dramatizes the fateful moments of an empire and its subjects.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Like a Sword Wound