100 Books Like Turkish Letters

For Istanbul the best walking guide ever. This book seamlessly conducts a visitor around the city’s sights, weaving stories from its history into street-by-street locations and managing above all else to avoid the sin of becoming boring. It makes you want to see every stretch of pavement and every building mentioned in the book. The only warning is it’s a thick paperback and you’ll want to take notes from it in advance rather than carrying it around with you.

Tonguç is probably Turkey’s most famous travel guide and Yale is the former writer of the Turkey Lonely Planet guide. Together they’ve written a beautifully put-together guide to the Bosphorus, the watery strait that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn. Each entry includes the history and images of neighbourhoods along the waterway, but it’s the quirky anecdotes, nostalgia, and personal photographs, combined with exhaustive coverage of every park, palace, mansion, fountain, mosque, church, synagogue, and other examples of architectural majesty found in them that makes this guide invaluable.

Visitors always go to Topkapı Palace and marvel at its elaborate ceremonial courts and beautifully sinister harem where women were sequestered away from prying eyes. It offers a tantalising glimpse into the world of the Ottoman elite but if you want to get a richer idea of what it was like, this book brings it to life. Author John Freely, a physicist and long-term resident of the city, combined historical fact with engaging writing and a blazing passion for all things Ottoman and Turkish to tell the story of the Sultans, their wives, children, and court followers. He drew from rare books in Turkish libraries and travellers’ records as well as letters and reports made by visiting foreign dignitaries of the period to capture moments when innocent amusements, gentle flirtations, and simple pastimes turned into brutal murders and dramatic intrigues.

I’m always seeking to learn more about Istanbul’s multicultural past and Kuzguncuk, on the Asian side of Istanbul, is an area rich in history. The leafy streets and community vegetable garden are now extremely popular with Turkish hipsters, but Mills looked behind the surface by doing an incredible amount of research and conducting fascinating interviews with residents, to bring the past into the present. Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and Turks have always lived together here and in Streets of Memory their individual stories, ethnic histories, and differing memories are carefully woven together to create a deeply nuanced, complex picture of Istanbul.

Turkish Awakening is the result of Alev Scott’s desire to discover the land of her mother’s birth and explore contemporary Turkish life and politics. Scott combines personal insights with an objective gaze to focus on a confusing and often contradictory culture, to try to unravel the complex relationships between modernity and religion unfolding in Turkey today. She chats with taxi drivers, examines how sex work and transgender inhabitants coexist, sometimes uneasily, next door to conservative Muslims recently relocated from the country, and explores the impact of popular soap operas featuring the newly rich on the aspirations of ordinary Turks and international tourism. The rise of the ruling Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP – Party for Justice and Progress) is covered as well as Turkey’s changing relationship with the EU. The book ends with Scott’s observations about the protests that sprang to life in Gezi Park in Istanbul and then spread… show more.

As publishers Dorling Kindersley have invented a great format, juxtaposing pictures and information in a way nobody else has ever done. The volume on Turkey is a browser’s paradise and if it doesn’t inspire you to want to visit the country and its largest city, then there’s something wrong with you. The introduction to Turkish life and the 80 or so pages on Istanbul are superb, cramming in so much knowledge but in a way that lets you skim and peruse it at your own pace, skipping about in the text, and lost in awe over the photographs of human structures and scenery. A Turkish traveler must-have!

I love the senses in my books. I want to know what the setting smells like, what it sounds like, and how much indigestion I am going to get from the local fare. If you do as well, Joesph Kanon is your guy, and this is your book.

I found this book before I traveled to Istanbul, and honestly, I liked it better than the city, which was chaotic and dirty. But Istanbul Passage is anything but chaotic and dirty; you’re going to love it.

Reading this novel is like opening a secret back door into history. I was propelled into an intimate atmosphere in the kitchens, boudoirs, living rooms, and offices of those involved in the slow-motion collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

I was privy to the political and personal intrigues of an unforgettable cast of characters, both men and women, as well as to their erotic and emotional lives in a rapidly changing society. 

Eric Ambler was the first author to write with realism and authenticity about the world of spies. His work often features ordinary people who are not criminals or professional spies, but who suddenly find themselves caught up in that murky world. In this novel, while in Turkey, mystery writer Charles Latimer meets Colonel Haki, who shows him the body of a notorious criminal, Dimitrios, in the Istanbul morgue. Intrigued and sensing a story, Latimer investigates Dimitrios’ career, which will turn out to be a lot more intriguing and dangerous than anything he bargained for. Ambler’s thrillers keep you on the edge and this one, which includes a ride on the Orient Express, will have you furiously turning the pages. Dimitrios set the standard for every spy thriller that followed. 

The individual conflicts described in this book stem from the reality of relationships that are supposed to be in a certain way, but somehow get twisted into something different, rather forbidden, or at least with blurred boundaries. I love the interweaving of spirituality, cultural diversity, and the parallel timelines, past and present. The characters are complex and represent different value systems. Swinging between their own personal struggles, trying to find suitable answers to the big questions of life, they get caught in a web of events that lead to surprising consequences.