The Girl From the Golden Horn is an insinuatingly and strikingly beautiful novel—suspenseful and exotic—and Kurban Said is, once again, in full control of his power to entertain and enthrall.
The extraordinary saga of the mysterious life of Kurban Said was told in amazing detail in a recent New Yorker article. One of the most beguiling mysteries it uncovered was the existence of another magical novel—The Girl From the Golden Horn. It is being published in English now for the first time. It is 1928 and Asiadeh Anbara and her father, members of the Turkish royal court, find themselves in exile in Berlin after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Years ago she had been promised to a Turkish prince but now, under the spell of the West, the nineteen-year-old Muslim girl falls in love and marries a Viennese doctor, an "unbeliever." But when she again meets the prince—now a screenwriter living in exile in New York—and he decide he wants her as his wife, she is torn between the marriage she made in good faith and her promised duty made long ago. The Girl From the Golden Horn is a novel of the clash of cultures and values—of prewar Istanbul and decadent postwar Berlin. And, of course, Muslims and Christians. But it is also about the clash within Asiadeh herself, and the tension between duty and desire.
