The Bastard of Istanbul is full of contradictory women. In the opening scene a brave, unconventional girl named Zeliah runs through the rain in a short skirt and high heels and stops to browse in the market even though she is already late for an appointment. The appointment, it turns out, is for an abortion which she never gets. At the same time in Arizona a woman named Rose, a new mother and newly divorced, begins flirting with a Turkish man to annoy her Armenian ex-husband. Twenty years later, Rose and Zeliah's daughters both search for the unnameable essence that seems to be missing in their lives- one exploring the past, the other denying it. This book defied pretty much every expectation I had about it. I loved seeing the melting pot of Istanbul through the eyes of four generations of women, and was delighted with the surprise threads of fantasy, history and family drama which wove the story together.