When David Matthews’s mother abandoned him as an infant, she left him with white skin and the rumor that he might be half Jewish. For the next twenty years, he would be torn between his actual life as a black boy in the ghetto of 1980s Baltimore and a largely imagined world of white privilege.
Meg Mabry has spent her life oppressed by her family’s legacy—a heritage beginning with the journals written by her great-grandmother in the 1890s. Until now, Meg has stubbornly refused to read the journals. But when Meg finally succumbs to the allure of her great-grandmother’s story, everything she believed about her family is turned upside down.
The Bastard of Istanbul is the story of two families, one Turkish and one Armenian American, and their struggle to forge their unique identities against the backdrop of Turkey's violent history. This exuberant, dramatic novel is about memory and forgetting, about the tension between the need to examine the past and the desire to erase it.
