Zülfü Livaneli, born Ömer Zülfü Livanelioğlu in 1946, is a Turkish novelist, composer, film director and politician, and one of the country's best-known cultural figures. His novels include The Eunuch of Constantinople (1996), Bliss (2002), Last Island (2008) and Serenade for Nadia. Bliss received the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers award in 2006; he has also won the Balkan Literary Award for best novel (1997), the Yunus Nadi Award (2001) and the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize (2009). He sat...
Konstantiniyye Oteli
Konstantiniyye Oteli
Synopsis
Konstantiniyye Oteli follows the 2014 opening gala of a seven-star hotel built atop the excavated remains of a Byzantine necropolis in Istanbul. Each of the high-profile guests seated at the ceremony represents some current thread of the city's public life, and through Zehra — the right hand of the hotel's wealthy owner — Zülfü Livaneli threads their stories together with those of the hotel staff and the ghosts of Istanbul's Byzantine past.
As the numbered tables move outward from the guest of honor, status anxiety, envy, and old resentments surface among the assembled elite, exposing the fault lines beneath the city's glossy modern surface. Through Zehra's eyes, the novel moves fluidly between the city's wealthy, its underclasses, and its dead, using one hotel's opening night to unfold Istanbul's long history from Byzantium to the present.
Konstantiniyye Oteli was adapted into the television series Kefaret (2020-2021).
Vibe
Genres
Characters
ZehraProtagonist
The right hand of the hotel's wealthy owner, through whose eyes the novel's many stories are threaded together.
Places
Edition
Konstantiniyye OteliPaperback, Aug
480 pages
Dogan KitapISBN: 9786050926316
