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  • Published: 20 October 2010
  • ISBN: 9780141961378
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 448

The Flea Palace




By turns comic and tragic, The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice.

Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartment block in Istanbul. Now it is a sadly dilapidated home to ten wildly different individuals and their families.

There's a womanizing, hard-drinking academic with a penchant for philosophy; a 'clean freak' and her lice-ridden daughter; a lapsed Jew in search of true love; and a charmingly naïve mistress whose shadowy past lurks in the building. When the rubbish at Bonbon Palace is stolen, a mysterious sequence of events unfold that result in a soul-searching quest for truth.

By turns comic and tragic, The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by a powerful sense of social justice.

  • Published: 20 October 2010
  • ISBN: 9780141961378
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 448

About the author

Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist, whose work has been translated into fifty-eight languages. The author of twenty books, thirteen of which are novels, she is a bestselling author in many countries around the world. Shafak’s novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. The Island of Missing Trees was a Sunday Times bestseller, and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. There are Rivers in the Sky, which won an Edward Stanford Award for Fiction, is her latest novel. Shafak holds a PhD in political science, and is a Fellow and a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature. She has been awarded the medal of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and, in 2024, was awarded the British Academy President's Medal for ‘her excellent body of work which demonstrates an incredible intercultural range’.

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Praise for The Flea Palace

Picaresque charm with a touch of magic realism

Independent

An enchanting combination of compassion and cruelty . . . Elif Shafak is the best author to come out of Turkey in the last decade

Orhan Pamuk

Picaresque

Guardian

A gem of a novel

Waterstones

Wonderful

Bookseller

Ms Shafak is well set to challenge Mr Pamuk as Turkey's foremost contemporary novelist

Economist