Halide's Gift: A Novel

About this book

Set in magical mystical Constantinople in the closing years of the nineteenth century Halides Gift is the story of a family with a secret and a society in turbulent transition. At the heart of this beguiling novel are two sistersone flamboyant and mischievous the other shy and full of dreamsbound by an extraordinary friendship who will be torn apart by their love of radically different men. Selima Edib the aristocratic wife of the sultans first secretary bequeaths to her daughter Halide her passionate spirit and her gifta power nursed within the family for generations passed on from mother to daughter and never revealed to outsiders: the power to see and commune with the spirits of the dead. Halides gift leaves her torn between the spiritual tradition-bound world of her grandmother and the intellectual world of her father a deeply conflicted man who defies the sultans edict to give his daughter the education of a Western woman despite his loyalty to the regime. As the story unfolds Sultan Abdul Hamid plots through his spies and informers to crush the increasingly vocal opposition leaving Halide and her sister Mahmoure on either side of a dangerous political divide.