It is tempting to read Elif Shafak’s latest novel, The Architect’s Apprentice, as a love letter to Istanbul and its Ottoman past, or even a kind of apology to the city she left behind when she moved to London with her two children four years ago. The book, which Shafak wrote in English before revising its translation into Turkish, spans the era from 1546 to 1632 and tells the story of the great imperial architect Mimar Sinan, through the eyes of an invented apprentice and elephant-keeper, Jinan, who stows away from Goa as a 12-year-old to escape an evil stepfather.
The novel evokes the glory and cruelty of the Sultanate at its peak, under Suleiman the Magnificent and his successors. But to see it as anything as simple as a celebration of the city in which Shafak has spent much of her life would be a mistake.
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