The Flea Palace

Shortlisted for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Elif Shafak's "The Flea Palace" is a moving and highly original novel about a group of individuals who live in the same building and who together become embroiled in a mystery.

By turns comic and tragic, "The Flea Palace" is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice.

Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartment block in Istanbul. Now it is a sadly dilapidated home to ten wildly different individuals and their families.

There's a womanizing, hard-drinking academic with a penchant for philosophy; a 'clean freak' and her lice-ridden daughter; a lapsed Jew in search of true love; and a charmingly naive mistress whose shadowy past lurks in the building.

When the rubbish at Bonbon Palace is stolen, a mysterious sequence of events unfolds that result in a soul-searching quest for truth.

'Picaresque' Guardian

'Hyperactive and hilarious' Independent

Elif Shafak's new novel, "There Are Rivers in the Sky," is available now.