Sailing Through Byzantium by Maureen Freely
Critics’ Reviews
In Sailing through Byzantium, Maureen Freely’s Istanbul is an absorbing Never-Never Land, a place of wild parties and refuge for social pariahs. This book is full of surprises…the cover with its moody close-up of a solemn child gives no clue about its level of intrigue, or its cleareyed prose.
— Times Literary Supplement
Finely calibrated, compassionate and compellingly observed, Sailing Through Byzantium is a triumph.
— Jason Goodwin, Cornucopia
History pours through this wonderful novel, but refracted through a young girl’s enchantment and dread. This is the story of a country, a city, a family, a scared child, in which memory throws the past into a kaleidoscopic pattern, vivid and always changing. In other words: quite fabulous!
— Nicci Gerrard
Rich, seductive, exciting.
— Maggie Gee
What Freely does succinctly and memorably is conjure up the picture of Turkey in the 1960s – how odd, how romantic and how mysterious it must have seemed to a young child from distant America. And what a gift to the reader.
— Alison Coles, BookOxygen
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