In Maureen Freely’s own words: ‘It’s about an old Istanbul family that derives its prestige from the patriotic ancestor who served next to Mustafa Kemal in Turkey’s War of Independence. His wildly bohemian descendants have been in the news ever since, often for less noble reasons. But no one ever speaks about how they came into their money – until Dora, Pasha’s granddaughter, takes it upon herself to investigate her family’s past. Whereupon her world unravels.’

There is so much I still don’t know about history in this region, about the culture and the people, even though I did pay attention at school, especially in relation to the Polish situation, as we learnt the King Jan III Sobieski of Poland had saved the rest of Europe from the Ottoman Empire’s influence. Battle of Vienna in 1683 was the defining moment for the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire, led by the Habsburg monarchy, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Ottoman Empire, founded around the year 1299, controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia and North Africa. It was the largest political entity in this part of the world until its demise and eventual the dissolution by treaties after the end of WWI. The modern Turkish Republic was established. But I digress a bit.

My Blue Peninsula by Maureen Freely, published by Linen Press, is her fourth novel set in Istanbul which she knows very well after spending childhood there while her father taught physics at an American University in the city. Curious about the author and academic Maureen Freely, I began searching for information about her work as an acclaimed writer and a translator of books from Turkish, including five written by Orhan Pamuk who was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. That led me to read about other Turkish authors whose books Maureen Freely brought into English, and about the fairly recent tragic history of the country. For more than a century the Turkish state refused to acknowledge the Armenian genocide in 1915. Even mentioning the word could have led to prosecutions, and it did. However, history cannot be ignored and forgotten as it still affects generations of people whose own personal history needs its own voice. The geopolitical context, ‘moving’ borders and dealing with the shameful past gives My Blue Peninsula a truly epic feel, especially as various characters come from different countries. Yet personal drama makes it intimate and heartbreaking. This vivid powerful book focuses on Dora Giraud’s search for truth, as her extended family is just one of thousands that experienced the shameful and tragic past.

The novel’s strong precise prose of seven notebooks, akin to confessions, chart life of Dora from her upbringing and childhood in America into late middle age, taking in numerous locations and the enormously complex legacy. This personal journal is meant for her adult daughters Maude and Clementine; an exploration of the turbulent past and explanation of her decision to remain in Istanbul and risk her life to continue campaign to record and acknowledge the Greek, Armenian and Assyrian genocides. In the capital city she has survived an extremist attack which killed Tallis, her American ex-husband, and yet she is unable to leave the past behind.

That process is difficult. Dora uncovers strands of family heritage linked to the past and constantly influencing her choices. She is part-Ottoman, part-Armenian, part-American, and a descendant of the genocide, having both the victims and the perpetrators in the genealogical line. At first she is curious and confused when suddenly her quiet life in New York turns into an international adventure across the ocean. Bohemian and mysterious spy drama awaits when her beautiful secretive mother Delphine decides to move to Istanbul in the 1960s and then the realisation that she has two passports hits her. Getting to know relatives and making friends while embracing free artistic atmosphere in her grandmother Hermine’s city apartment, she begins to discover the reality of conflicts, although she is often unaware of real events, decisions, reasons. And as she learns more, she also grows more determined to untangle strands and to understand what’s happening in the Cold War context, its aftermath, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

Although the search for identity, belonging and comprehension proves to be a painful emotional journey, Dora must do that, and she seeks love and assurance, too. She needs her family, her people. Her story is rich, complicated, violate and engrossing. It cannot exist in limbo as relationships between various members of her huge family are so entwined and dependent on the actions of previous generations. There are many white lies, and unspoken secrets, hidden issues. Cousins are not always who they seem and might not be related by blood. Generations do not follow a standard pattern. Betrayal and confusing connections are everywhere. But this is her cultural and historical inheritance:

‘I’d try to imagine what I could say. That my mother was a spy, and my father the son of a Pasha? That my grandmother, a brilliant but scandal-prone artist, had only learned to love her husband after shooting him in the neck?’ ‘How was I to explain that tangled roots like these had not been unusual in the ruling classes of this vanished empire that my lovely new friends had probably never heard of? Or that I nevertheless felt disappointment on discovering these roots, because it meant that my father could not therefore be a Soviet spy of whom I was so very fond? How could I convey how jarring it had been [..] to realise that my cousin Sinan was in actual fact my nephew?’