The Flea Palace

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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.

Picaresque charm with a touch of magic realism
Independent

About Elif Shafak

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist, whose work has been translated into fifty-seven languages. The author of twenty books, fourteen of which are novels, she was awarded the Halldór Laxness Prize for her contribution to the art of storytelling. Shafak's previous novel, THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY, was the UK’s bestselling literary hardback novel of 2025, selling over 500,000 copies. Widely read in many countries around the world, her writing has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and Prix Femina Etranger, amongst others, and she was nominated for ‘Author of the Year’ at the British Book Awards. Elif Shafak was appointed President of the Royal Society of Literature in 2025. She was awarded the British Academy President’s medal for bravely tackling sensitive subjects and for her body of work which demonstrates an incredible intercultural range.

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