From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see.
Page 3

Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul — these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness. My imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.
Page 6

A person who was not fasting during Ramadan would perhaps suffer fewer pangs of conscience among these glass cupboards and dead pianos than he might if he were still sitting crosslegged in a room full of cushions and divans. Although everyone knew it as freedom from the laws of Islam, no...