Enlightenment: A Novel - Hardcover

Freely, Maureen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590200748 ISBN 13: 9781590200742

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2008

Synopsis

In October 2005, only a few months after her Turkish husband is detained and her five-year-old son distributed to a foster family by United States border patrol, Jeannie Wakefield disappears. She leaves behind in Istanbul a fifty-three-page letter to M, an investigative journalist whom Jeannie begs to write about her plight. The letter tells the story of Jeannie's first arrival in Turkey thirty-four years earlier, when she was a bright-eyed sixteen-year-old innocent, shimmering with open-hearted idealism. Desperate to soak up new experiences, well-meaning Jeannie found herself befriended by a group of high school students who would change her life--pretty, cautious Lüset; clean-cut, aristocratic Haluk; sullen Chloe, their jealous American tag-along; volatile, outspoken, and ruthlessly anti-imperialist Suna; and, at the center of it all, inscrutable and effortlessly charismatic Sinan, the dark horse who would steal Jeannie's heart the way he stole M's not long before. The letter goes on to reveal a convoluted tale of political intrigue, of retired intelligence operatives, a grisly murder, and a dismembered body in a trunk. When Dutch Harding, Jeannie's radical friends' beloved American teacher, disappears, the trail of blood leads to her door, and after interrogations, torture, car bombs, and suicide attempts, her clique is splintered and scattered across the globe. Jeannie's diary tells a grim and heartbreaking history of first loves shattered and best friends betrayed, and M finds herself, against her will, tangled in Jeannie's narrative. Jeannie has only asked her for one favor--to write one article exposing the horrible truth. But in the "deep state" of post-911 Turkey, nobody is who they say they are, and everyone is a suspect--exactly how much will M sacrifice to save the woman who stole her only true love?

About this title

About the Author

Maureen Freely was born in the United States and grew up in Istanbul. She graduated from Harvard University and is now a journalist and a professor at the University of Warwick as well as an acclaimed translator.

Reviews

Starred Review. At the start of Freely's complex, often riveting novel set in contemporary and Cold War Turkey, a journalist known only as Miss M returns to Istanbul in 2005 after a long absence at the request of Jeannie Wakefield, whose father, William, was an American spy. Jeannie hopes that Miss M will write an article to help her husband, once Miss M's lover, who's been detained in the United States and sent to Guantánamo. A few months later, Jeannie disappears, leaving behind a long letter detailing events from the 1960s. The main narrative threads—extracts from Jeannie's letter; Miss M's memories of Istanbul from that same period and her present-day account of investigating Jeannie's long-ago indoctrination into a Communist cell, which was at one point charged with the infamous but possibly apocryphal Trunk Murder—interweave toward a quietly stunning conclusion. Both mystery/thriller and mainstream literary readers will be well rewarded. Freely is the English translator of Nobel Prize–winner Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow. (May)
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It is no secret that most American’s don’t understand the complex web of social and political intricacies that define life in contemporary Turkey. Freely seeks to unravel both a mystery mired in the past and an archaic societal system that seems out of sync in the present. When Jeannie Wakefield disappears a few months after her Turkish husband is detained, an American journalist with Turkish ties identified only as Miss M receives a rambling missive from Jeannie detailing a tragic tale of deception and intrigue. Miss M’s tantalizing investigations involving international espionage and a grisly murder mystery stretch back and forth through time as she pieces together both Jeannie’s story and her own. Freely tops off this riveting narrative of cold war and post 9/11 Turkey with a chillingly unexpected revelation. --Margaret Flanagan

Edition details

• Publisher: The Overlook Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590200748
• ISBN 13: 9781590200742
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384