A Mind at Peace Hardcover - 2008

Excerpt

Mu?mtaz had not set out on a long walk since his paternal cousin I?hsan, a brother to him, had succumbed to illness. Aside from tasks like summoning the physician, taking prescriptions to the pharmacist, and making calls from the neighbor’s telephone, he’d whiled away the measure of the week at his cousin’s sickbed or in his own room perusing books, reflecting, or attempting to console his niece and nephew. I?hsan had complained of backaches, fever, and fatigue for about two days before pneumonia heralded its onset, sudden and sublime, establishing a sultanate over the household, a psychology of devastation through fear, dread, rue, and endless goodwill scarcely absent from lips or glances.

Media reviews

[A] masterpiece . . . [A] honeyed, searching, and melancholy epic . . . The novel is as much about its setting and colors as about the stories and wonderfully eccentric and varied panoply of characters . . . One of the 20th century's notable literary love stories and cultural watersheds.—The Los Angeles Times
The greatest novel ever written about Istanbul. —Orhan Pamuk
Written by the man who almost single-handedly defined the modern Turkish novel, A Mind At Peace follows a group of westernized, urban intellectuals in 1930s Istanbul as they drift through the city in a permanent state of ennui, seemingly caught between the past and the present, tradition and modernity, the East and the West.—Reza Aslan
A beautifully melodic picture of Istanbul and the Bosphorus during a crossroad of Turkish and world history. We shouldn’t have had to wait this long for such an important work.—Literary Fiction Review
His great novel combines the emotional storminess of Dostoevsky with the refined artificiality and cruel psychological analysis of Marcel Proust.—Ha'aretz