Not Constantinople by Nicholas Bredie
A dispute over an Istanbul apartment leads two American expats into lawlessness and intrigue in this comic debut novel
Fred and Virginia, two expats living in Istanbul and working at the university, come home one night to find their apartment occupied by a family of Greeks. Barred by a quirk of Turkish law from evicting them, Fred comes to a strange kind of understanding with their new squatters; he’s in Istanbul because the pay is good, and with the property in limbo he can ignore the rent, not to mention the paper-writing racket he starts with the Greek patriarch, selling term papers to his own university students.
Between get-rich schemes and run-ins with Kurdish separatists, Fred watches the transformation of his neighborhood from a place with a kind of sad romance to a generic megalopolis, gobbled up by greedy developers and the city’s rapacious elite. Lauded by T.C. Boyle as "tight and imaginative," Not Constantinople is the story of a city in transition and the uncertainty of life in a foreign country.
Publication Date: June 10 2017
Paperback: 320 pages
ISBN: 978-1-941088-75-3
Also available as an eBook
A dispute over an Istanbul apartment leads two American expats into lawlessness and intrigue in this comic debut novel
Fred and Virginia, two expats living in Istanbul and working at the university, come home one night to find their apartment occupied by a family of Greeks. Barred by a quirk of Turkish law from evicting them, Fred comes to a strange kind of understanding with their new squatters; he’s in Istanbul because the pay is good, and with the property in limbo he can ignore the rent, not to mention the paper-writing racket he starts with the Greek patriarch, selling term papers to his own university students.
Between get-rich schemes and run-ins with Kurdish separatists, Fred watches the transformation of his neighborhood from a place with a kind of sad romance to a generic megalopolis, gobbled up by greedy developers and the city’s rapacious elite. Lauded by T.C. Boyle as "tight and imaginative," Not Constantinople is the story of a city in transition and the uncertainty of life in a foreign country.
Publication Date: June 10 2017
Paperback: 320 pages
ISBN: 978-1-941088-75-3
Also available as an eBook
A dispute over an Istanbul apartment leads two American expats into lawlessness and intrigue in this comic debut novel
Fred and Virginia, two expats living in Istanbul and working at the university, come home one night to find their apartment occupied by a family of Greeks. Barred by a quirk of Turkish law from evicting them, Fred comes to a strange kind of understanding with their new squatters; he’s in Istanbul because the pay is good, and with the property in limbo he can ignore the rent, not to mention the paper-writing racket he starts with the Greek patriarch, selling term papers to his own university students.
Between get-rich schemes and run-ins with Kurdish separatists, Fred watches the transformation of his neighborhood from a place with a kind of sad romance to a generic megalopolis, gobbled up by greedy developers and the city’s rapacious elite. Lauded by T.C. Boyle as "tight and imaginative," Not Constantinople is the story of a city in transition and the uncertainty of life in a foreign country.
Publication Date: June 10 2017
Paperback: 320 pages
ISBN: 978-1-941088-75-3
Also available as an eBook
PRAISE FOR NOT CONSTANTINOPLE
“Utterly charming. Nick Bredie's debut novel is by turns whimsical and deeply affecting, managing to illuminate both the displaced couple at the heart of it and the city that maddens and liberates them.”
—TC Boyle, author of The Terranauts
“In spare, understated prose, our author captures the privileged aimlessness and corrupted romanticism of the contemporary white American expatriate. Bredie is a sly and unsparing writer for the post-Hemingway set, revealing a world of travel that is stripped of illusions and glamour.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Bredie is a writer who lived and worked in Istanbul, Turkey from 2010 to 2013. Currently he is a University Fellow at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Nora Lange, and their dog. Not Constantinople is his first novel.
