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.'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 pssibly do- to be once again in Istanbul'. NOEL MALCOM.