Media Reviews

"With manufactured intrigues and lukewarm romance, plot is not Shafak's strong point. What she offers is panoramic historical fiction rich with facts, atmosphere and occasional whimsy. " - Kirkus

"Shafak's ambitious and colorful novel loses momentum at times, but he skillfully uses the fictional elephant trainer to paint a vivid portrait of the great architect, Sinan, and the lives of both royals and commoners." - Publishers Weekly

"This edifying, emotionally forceful novel shows how hate and envy destroy, and how love might build the world anew." - The Observer (UK)

"Shafak's novel is a vigorous evocation of the Ottoman empire at the height of its power. . .a fascinating work in which building a fulfilling life can be as difficult as creating one of Sinan's masterpieces." - The Sunday Times (UK)

"At once epic and comic, fantastical and realistic ... a carefully crafted work of imagination that both reveals and conceals its skill. It will confirm Shafak's reputation as a writer of impressive range, who quietly resists categorization and is not afraid to ask the big questions." - Financial Times

"This is Shafak's most ambitious novel yet, and it is her best – told with a generous humanity that will surely realign attitudes both to the imaginative possibilities of fiction and to the constructed reality of the world around us." - The Independent (UK)

This information about The Architect's Apprentice shown above was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. In most cases, the reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that the reviews shown do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, please send us a message with the mainstream media reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Elif Shafak Author Biography

Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read female writer in Turkey. She is also a political commentator and an inspirational public speaker.

She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published 15 books, 10 of which are novels, including the bestselling The Bastard of Istanbul and The Forty Rules of Love. Her books have been translated into 47 languages. She is published by Penguin in the UK and represented by Curtis Brown globally.

Shafak is a TED Global speaker, a member of Weforum Global Agenda Council on Creative Economy in Davos and a founding member of ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations). She has been awarded the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2010 by the French government.

She has been featured in major ...

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Link to Elif Shafak's Website

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