Turkey s greatest living novelist guides us through the monuments and lost paradises, dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways of Istanbul the city of his birth and the home of his imagination. An extraordinary and transcendentally beautiful book . . . It is a long time since I have read a book of such crystalline originality, or one that moved me so much. Katie Hickman This evocative book succeeds at both its tasks. It is one of the most touching childhood memoirs I have read in a very long time; and it makes me yearn -- more than any glossy tourist brochure could possibly do -- to be once again in Istanbul. Noel Malcom, Sunday Telegraph An irresistibly seductive book, and its seduction lies not in the author s self-portrait, but in his poetical identification with Istanbul . . . His novels have already made him celebrated throughout the world, but perhaps he will be longest remembered for this wistful memorial to the city of his heart. Jan Morris, Guardian Extraordinary and moving. Financial Times A declaration of love. Sunday Times Magnificent, elegiac, impressionistic. Literary Review This erudite book manages to be an addictive childhood memoir, a museum-in-prose of a city with west in its head but east in its soul, and a study of the alchemy between place and self. - David Mitchell, Guardian