Enlightenment

At the start of Freely’s complex, often riveting novel set in contemporary and Cold War Turkey, a journalist known only as “Miss M” returns to Istanbul in 2005 after a long absence at the request of Jeannie Wakefield, whose father, William, was an American spy. Jeannie hopes that Miss M will write an article to help her husband, once Miss M’s lover, who’s been detained in the United States and sent to Guantánamo. A few months later, Jeannie disappears, leaving behind a long letter detailing events from the 1960s. The main narrative threads—extracts from Jeannie’s letter; Miss M’s memories of Istanbul from that same period and her present-day account of investigating Jeannie’s long-ago indoctrination into a Communist cell, which was at one point charged with the infamous but possibly apocryphal Trunk Murder—interweave toward a quietly stunning conclusion. Both mystery/thriller and mainstream literary readers will be well rewarded. Freely is the English translator of Nobel Prize–winner Orhan Pamuk’s novel, Snow . (May)