The Flea Palace

by Elif Shafak

First published 2002

Amazon

3.4(8,436)

Bonbon Palace is a once-elegant Istanbul apartment building now occupied by ten households whose lives overlap through gossip, smell, noise and suspicion. A divorced academic, immigrant families, twins, shopkeepers, outsiders and people protecting private obsessions attempt to preserve dignity while rubbish accumulates around the building and the city changes beyond it.

The theft of apparently insignificant objects and the mystery of the refuse expose connections among residents who prefer to imagine themselves separate. Their stories move between comedy, loneliness and cruelty, turning the building into a miniature society organised by class, prejudice and habit. The novel is contemporary social fiction rather than a historical novel, so no historical context has been forced onto the record.