The Early Hours

Set in the dramatic last days of the Ottoman Empire, this novel of love and bloodshed depicts a world trapped between Islam and the modern age. Camruddin is a simple Macedonian soldier caught up in the Young Turk conspiracy to overthrow the Sultan. A romance with a girl from a Pasha s harem presents him with a desperate choice: to join the Jihad in the Balkan hills, or to enjoy his love and the patronage of a high Imperial official. The collapse of old Turkey, amid intimations of the birth of a new nation, is brilliantly depicted, as the humour and good-natured nobility of the Ottoman establishment totters under the hammer-blows of invasion and internal revolt.