Ahmet Altan

'I don't remember pulling the trigger; I only heard the gunshot. And then I saw a mouth opening, as if to speak, a face contorted, one hand in the air. And then a body falling.' A man retires to a sun-baked Turkish town for a quiet life. But he finds a world of suspicion, paranoia and violence. The town has made a murderer of him. The question is, who did he kill? Led by a deeply untrustworthy narrator, Ahmet Altan's international bestseller pulls...

"The second installment in the Ottoman Quartet--the masterful saga of Turkish history by Ahmet Altan--follows the vast and vivid cast of characters introduced in the first volume of the series, Like A Sword Wound. The novel opens with the attempted suicide of Hikmet Bey, the son of the sultan's personal physician. The reason for his extreme gesture was to forget the extremely beautiful and proud Mehpare Hanım, his wife and the cause of all his suffering....