SOURCE: Hopkin, James. “Turkish Delight.” New Statesman 13, no. 662 (11 September 2000): 56.

In the following review, Hopkin argues that The Stone Woman is a captivating and complex novel.

The third novel in a planned quarter charting the tensions between Islam and Christianity, Tariq Ali's The Stone Woman sets up the Pasha family from Istanbul as a microcosm of the Ottoman empire at the end of the 19th century. Drawing on a rich tradition of mythmaking and storytelling, Ali creates an enchanting, sometimes harrowing, fable of a family whose stability and harmony, like the empire to which they belong, is largely predicated on undisclosed information and recycled myths.

Ali teases out these secrets with the grace and guile of a natural storyteller. A weathered sculpture of a pagan goddess—“the repository of all our hidden pain”—becomes the focal point for those concealing difficult truths. Each character approaches her and confesses a...