Here’s a list from yesterday’s Guardian: 10 of my favourite books about Turkey (though to judge from some of the comments, you might think I’d written a list called ‘The Only Ten Books about Turkey You Should Ever Read’!)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/31/jason-goodwin-top-10-books-turkey
See what you think…!
The list was republished in the liberal Turkish paper Taraf, too:
Shortly before the British launch of An Evil Eye, a greedy web-hosting company in Melbourne made off with my website. Largely on principle (and partly because they asked for money, and I’d lost all my original set-up passwords, user names and such), I have walked away from it, with my nose in the air.
I’m about to start another at www.jasongoodwin.info. My children assure me that the dot-info tag is very low, but there’s someone else who has .com and frankly, .info describes exactly what I want. Plus it’s delightfully cheap.
Meantime, apologies to anyone searching elsewhere on the web. Come back later!
I’ve had some great feedback for An Evil Eye already, both in the States and in the UK, and I was chuffed that the Christian Science Monitor chose The Janissary Tree and its sequels as one of its favourite foreign detective series…
And here is Marco Ventura’s delicious cover, for Faber in the UK.
and it matches Porto Editora’s previous edition of The Janissary Tree beautifully!
From the Globe and Mail:
By Jason Goodwin, FSG, 304 pages, $29.95
The fourth novel in the marvellous Investigator Yashim series is the best of a great bunch. Goodwin’s grand evocation of the glories of the Ottoman Empire takes us into the heart of Istanbul in 1839. Admiral Fevzi Ahmet, Yashim’s old leader and mentor, has defected to the Egyptians. Why would one of the Sultan’s most honoured men show him such disrespect? The Sultan wants Yashim to investigate, but the search leads Yashim to the closed world of the Sultan’s harem, where it appears the secret of the Admiral’s betrayal lies. A great addition to a superb series with an unforgettable investigator.
Having rather diffidently gone online to check on the Daggers – phew! I’m in, along with five other devious and crafty crime-writers: SJ Bolton (Bantam Press, Transworld), RJ Ellory (Orion), Mo Hayder (Bantam Press, Transworld), Susan Hill (Vintage), and Philip Kerr (Quercus). Great company.
The Daggers are Britains’s own awards for crime writing, in various categories; what’s lovely about the Library Dagger is that it’s awarded by librarians and library users, and not just not for a single book but for all the books we’ve written. Libraries are facing hard times as the other, duller ‘books’ get balanced, and local authorities look to make cuts in their budget. Protest is the only option: I am warmed to incadescant rage by the erection of new traffic lights in my local town, replacing a perfectly good zebra crossing, at a cost of millions (it’s construction, folks!) while local village libraries are closed. I suspect that transport departments build empires for themselves, and find pointless work to do, while libraries costing next to nothing are scotched.
Libraries are church. They are coffee morning, afternoon tea. They are beacons, they are surprising. They succeed because they are always there. They feed children with ideas, they provide mothers with respite, they comfort and counsel the elderly. They are radical and unfazed. The people who work in them – and I only recently addressed a feisty bunch, the ALA, in America – are smart and funny and paid for library work, not for being the counsellors or teachers that they are. They are the largest of the Little Platoons Burke spoke about, when he atomized civic life two – three – centuries ago.
Lending a book doesn’t create work in County Hall. It creates minds. It creates the synapses of society, any society worth inhabiting.
Hurrah for the Daggers! But all halloos for the libraries!
The e-book featuring some Yashim recipes came out lacking the first few chapters of An Evil Eye, but that’s fixed now.
It’s called Cooking with Yashim and it’s available in North America to dowload for free.
For ipods and ipads and phones –
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/cooking-with-yashim/id433597489?mt=11
and on Kindle –
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004XHZ0EC/ref=cm_rdp_product_img
We thought this would be fun for Yashim mystery fans – a mini e-book with some new recipes from Yashim’s kitchen.
You can download it here for free – provided you aren’t in the UK. An Evil Eye comes out in Britain on July 7th, so there’s some sort of embargo. Don’t blame me.
If you enjoy it, do pass it along so that everyone can have a go!
Scott Montgomery is the crime supremo at Book People in Austin. After the gig, he suggests eating Texan. Will it be TexMex or BBQ? We opt for the meat, and good it is.
Scott’s organizing this year’s bumper crime fest in the US, known as Bouchercon, in St Louis. The Western Hemisphere’s only Ottoman garden is in St Louis.
Lonnie and Sandy, two fabulous Austinites who have travelled the world (I mean, the world: Lonnie had his nose broken in a storm off the Antarctic, and they have lived in France), are determined to break our resistance to Tex Mex, and invite us to lunch. Bill Clinton ate here, as president, so there’s no question that this is the best of its breed.
I wish I could say that the scales fell from my eyes and I let Tacos into my heart. It isn’t the flavour. It is, I think, the texture. The crackly corn chips, the runny sauces, the chewy wraps. But we had a great lunch and then L and S took us on a whirlwind tour of Austin, culminating in a trip to the University to see a Gutenburg Bible and the world’s first photo. It’s not a very clear photo after all this time, but it was taken in France in 1829, seven years before my first historical detective story, The Janissary Tree, opens. It’s hard to imagine.
We stayed in a rockstar hotel in Austin. The St Cecilia has a sister motel just around the corner, on the achingly cool strip of Congress where the vintage stores and the food caravans are; both hotels are funky – but St Cecilia is for grown-ups, sort of. The word SOUL is reflected in the pool in neon lights. There’s a main house and around the house are these groovy Ottoman kiosks with wide spreading eaves and cunningly devised suites which you can stay in. The floors are covered in huge turquoise tiles, the shower is a wet room, and you can borrow records from the library. You can pretend you’re the only people there or you can go and hang out by the pool.
The babes checked in the day we checked out, but never mind – the hotel got us a reservation to eat at Uchi, said to be the best sushi in the South – and don’t even mention California. Yashim would not have approved, but the belly pork in a cornmeal crust was, as they say, melting.
St Cecilia melted us. Izzy said it was the coolest hotel he’d ever stayed in and I, veteran of those particular wars, could only agree.
We took 290 out of Austin, after popping into Wholefoods to buy a picnic. Actually you don’t pop into Wholefoods. It’s like the Food Halls at Harrods, but redone as a chromium ’63 Pontiac by the cast of Holiday on Ice. It sparkles, it twinkles, it stacks and it fillets and chops and roasts and grills; choose a bread, take the brisket, mustard with that? Wanna juice, have a grill, chat back, pick up some chocolate…
It’s like being a greedy little silver ball in a gingerbread pinball machine.
Grazing on our dripping roasts, like goats nibbling low branches, we rolled down 290 towards Houston, stopping to buy pecans, pronounced here perkahns, and admiring the ranch entrances, the cattle in the grass, and the beautiful oaks. Rolling country makes the heart ache.
In Houston, my gig was at Murder by the Book, a phenomenal store run by a glamorous girl with a name to match – McKenna Jordan, who also happens to be a virtuoso violinist. She is also responsible for republishing Crossroad Blues. Out of the Texan glare it is cool and comfortable, and the store is crammed with books, a few of them mine.
After the gig, we are treated to a magnificent dinner at Haven. Without making eye contact, Izzy and I go for the steak. It’s Texas, after all. But not Joe Lansdale’s Texas: this is the swanky Texas that belongs to the nation’s fourth largest city, and our host, Ken Tekell Sr, is a notable lawyer and my neighbour at table a world-class neurologist.
The steak is pretty good too.
