Michael David Lukas - The Oracle of Stamboul

College of Marin, Kentfield Library

Other College of Marin ESCOM Lectures:

Don George - An Innocent Abroad

Cara Black - Murder on the Champ de Mars

ESCOM is delighted to partner with Book Passage in bringing a free series of interesting authors to the community. ESCOM, the Emeritus Students College of Marin, is a unique organization of 1500 senior students within the Community Education Department at the College of Marin. The organization fosters lifelong learning through classes, clubs, special events and a reading room. They publish a newsletter of original writing and commentary. ESCOM is sustained by memberships, gifts and bequests. Leadership is through a Council and various committees.

Ushered into the world by a mysterious pair of Tartar midwives late in the summer of 1877 in the town of Constanta on the Black Sea, Eleonora Cohen proves herself an extraordinarily gifted child—a prodigy—at a very young age. When she is eight years old, she stows away aboard a ship, following her carpet merchant father, Yakob, to the teeming and colorful imperial capital of Stamboul where a new life awaits her.

In the narrow streets of this city at the crossroads of the world, intrigue and gossip are currency, and people are not always what they seem. But it is only when she charms the eccentric Sultan Abdulhamid II—beleaguered by friend and foe as his unwieldy realm crumbles—that Eleonora will change the course of an empire.

Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and a waiter at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. Translated into more than a dozen languages, his first novel The Oracle of Stamboul was a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Maryland, he is a recipient of scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Elizabeth George Foundation. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, and Georgia Review.

Parking: Free campus parking for the event.

For more information call the ESCOM Volunteer Desk: 415-485-9652

 

Location: 

College of Marin, Kentfield Library
835 College Ave
Kentfield, CA 94904