Flea Palace

Shortlisted for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Elif Shafak's <i>The Flea Palace</i> is a moving and highly original novel about a group of individuals who live in the same building and who together become embroiled in a mystery. <p/>By turns comic and tragic <i>The Flea Palace</i> is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice. <p/>Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartment block in Istanbul. Now it is a sadly dilapidated home to ten wildly different individuals and their families. <p/>There's a womanizing hard-drinking academic with a penchant for philosophy; a 'clean freak' and her lice-ridden daughter; a lapsed Jew in search of true love; and a charmingly naïve mistress whose shadowy past lurks in the building. When the rubbish at Bonbon Palace is stolen a mysterious sequence of events unfolds that result in a soul-searching quest for truth. <p/>'Picaresque' <i>Guardian</i> <p/>'Hyperactive and hilarious' <i>Independent</i> <p/><b>*** ELIF SHAFAK'S NEW NOVEL </b><i><b>THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY</b></i><b> IS AVAILABLE NOW ***</b>