The Bosphorus Affair

She crossed a continent to repair other people's beautiful, broken things. She never imagined she would become one of them.

At forty-five, Eleanor Hartley is the finest art conservator no one looks at twice. Her marriage has gone silent, her daughter has flown, and the most tender thing in her life is the brushwork of painters who died three hundred years ago.

So when a commission takes her to Istanbul (four months alone in a crumbling mansion on the Bosphorus, restoring the collection of a man who died without heirs), she goes hungry for something she cannot name.

His name is Adem Varol. He deals in antiquities and old houses along the water, he speaks five languages, and he looks at Eleanor as though she is the only woman who has ever walked into a room. Beneath the fig trees and the call to prayer, beside the dark current that swallows the city's light, she falls: completely, recklessly, gratefully.

But the most valuable thing Adem deals in is belief. And Eleanor is not the first woman to give him hers.

The Bosphorus Affair is a heartbreaking, sensual novel about desire after forty, the stories we will believe in order to feel alive, and the terrible price of finally being chosen. For anyone who has ever wondered: would I have seen it coming?

A standalone novel. Includes a Reading Group Guide.