Alev Lytle Croutier

While trying to help her financially destitute family, twelve-year-old Leyla ends up on a slave ship bound for Istanbul, then in the beautiful Topkapi Palace, where she discovers that life in the sheltered world of the palace harem follows its own rigid rules and rhythms and offers her unexpected opportunities during Turkey's brief Tulip Period of the 1720s. Simultaneous. 100,000 first printing.

The Black Tulip

Leyla

The World Behind the Veil

Harem

عالم الحريم خلف الحجاب

Manuela Madureira

O palácio das lágrimas

In 1868 Paris, Casimir de ChGteauneuf, a successful vinter, becomes obsessed with a disturbing but beautiful dream and begins to search for the woman from his subconscious whose eyes captured his heart. Reprint.

The Palace of Tears

Rudyard Kipling

Alberto Manguel

Presents the adventures of Mowgli, a boy reared by a pack of wolves and the wild animals of the jungle, includes other short stories set in India.

The Jungle Books

It is 1868. On a balmy autumn afternoon in Paris, young winemaker Casimir de Châteauneuf wanders into a small shop filled with curiosities from the Orient. There he spies a cache of fine miniature portraits. Above all others, an ivory-skinned beauty captivates him. Her eyes ... one blue, the other yellow. That night they pursue Casimir in his dreams, as one burning question consumes him: Who is she? Thus begins Alev Croutier’s lush, stirring adventure of the heart — a mesmerizing tale of forbidden passion, true love, and destiny. For Casimir will forsake his family, his vocation, and his country to find the object of his obsession. His journey will lead him across desert and sea, from the Royal Court in Paris to a sultan’s palace in Istanbul. And there he will find the woman of his reveries, the woman with one blue eye, the other yellow. But in this city of passion, in a Palace of Tears, Casimir is about to discover what it will mean to make a dream real ... and what awaits him when his lover is set free.

A Novel

A fascinating illustrated history of one of the strangest, and cruelest, cultural institutions ever devised. A worldwide best seller, translated into twenty-five languages. “I was born in a konak (old house), which once was the harem of a pasha,” writes Alev Lytle Croutier. “People around me often whispered things about harems; my own grandmother and her sister had been brought up in one.” Drawing on a host of firsthand accounts and memoirs, as well as her own family history, Croutier explores life in the world’s harems, from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, focusing on the fabled Seraglio of Topkapi Palace as a paradigm for them all. We enter the slave markets and the lavish boudoirs of the sultanas; we witness the daily routines of the odalisques, and of the eunuchs who guarded the harem. Here, too, we learn of the labyrinthine political scheming among the sultan’s wives, his favorites, and the valide sultana—the sultan’s mother—whose power could eclipse that of the sultan himself. There were the harems of the sultans and the pashas, but there were also “middle-class” harems, the households in which ordinary men and women lived out ordinary—albeit polygamous—lives. Croutier reveals their marital customs, child-rearing practices, and superstitions. Finally, she shows how this Eastern institution invaded the European imagination—in the form of decoration, costume, and art—and how Western ideas, in turn, finally eroded a system that had seemed eternal. Juxtaposing a rich array of illustrations—Western paintings, Turkish and Persian miniatures, family photographs, and even film stills—Croutier demystifies the Western erotic fantasy of “the world behind the veil.” This revised and updated 25th anniversary edition of Harem includes a new introduction by the author, revisiting her subject in light of recent events in Turkey, and the world.

Harem: The World Behind the Veil (25th Anniversary Edition)

Illustrated with a diverse collection of historic and contemporary artwork, a study of the spiritual and sensual attractions of water traces the evolution of spas from prehistoric times to the present. By the author of Harem.

Spirit, Art, Sensuality

Taking the Waters

Harem explores life in the world's harems from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century.

Alev Lytle Croutier

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