The Bastard of Istanbul

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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 will change her life.

Twenty years later, Asya Kazanci lives with her extended family in Istanbul. Due to a mysterious family curse, all the Kazanci men die in their early 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 stay, long-hidden family secrets connected with Turkey's turbulent past begin to emerge.

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