Mavi Boncuk |The Mapmaker’s Daughter, by Katherine Nouri Hughes[1]
Delphinium Books (Distributor: HarperCollins)
Available in: Trade paperback With French Flaps 315 pages
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1-88-328570-8
Published: August 8, 2017
The Mapmaker's Daughter, an historical novel set in the 16th century, is the confession of Nurbanu, born Cecilia Baffo Veniero - the mesmerizing, illegitimate Venetian who became the most powerful woman in the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent - the bold backstory of the Netflix Series, Magnificent Century.
Narrating the story of her rise – improbable and inevitable - to the pinnacle of imperial power, Queen Mother Nurbanu, on her sickbed, is determined to understand how her bond with Suleiman, the greatest of all Ottoman sultans, shaped her destiny – not only as the wife of his successor but as the appointed enforcer of one of the Empire’s most crucial and shocking laws. Nurbanu spares nothing as she dissects the desires and motives that have propelled and harmed her; as she considers her role as devoted and manipulative mother; as she reckons her relations with the women of the Harem; and as she details the fate of the most sophisticated observatory in the world. Nurbanu sets out to “see” the causes and effects of her loves and choices, and she succeeds by means of unflinching candor - right up to the last shattering revelation.
EXCERPT
CHAPTER ONE Topkapi Palace
Monday, November 7, 1583
I have always been propelled by deaths. No matter how they’ve grieved and ground me down. Eleven of them were worst of all, and among those were the boys’. Those deaths are the heart of everything. The Empire’s order, now and to come. The Sultan’s power and prospect. Who I am, and who I thought I was.
It’s time I weigh their cost and worth. That they had—or have, or might have—worth is the crux and the story. I will tell it as far as I can see. For this is about seeing, not remembering.
Let me see, then. Let me see. READ MORE
[1] Katherine Nouri Hughes, Iraqi-Irish by birth, attended Princeton University where she received a Masters Degree in Near Eastern Studies and where she serves on that department’s advisory council. After living in Cairo and traveling extensively in the region she returned to the U.S. and was a communications executive in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. She has edited two books on k-12 education, and serves on the boards of the American University in Cairo, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and WNET/13, the public television station. Her husband, Robert Del Tufo, former U.S. Attorney and Attorney General of New Jersey, died in 2016. She lives in New York City and Princeton, New Jersey and has two daughters and two grandchildren. The Mapmaker’s Daughter is her first novel.The New Yorker - Briefly Noted:“The Mapmaker’s Daughter” October 2, 2017 Issue
The Mapmaker’s Daughter, by Katherine Nouri Hughes (Delphinium). In the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth century, a woman of Venetian birth gained power as the privileged consort of Sultan Selim II. Nurbanu Sultan (as she became known), the narrator of Hughes’s absorbing historical novel, defends her status against the vicious intrigues of Topkapi Palace. “It is fair to say about eunuchs that they are vindictive, babyish, condescending, and easily bored,” she reflects at one point. According to custom, when a new sultan ascends, his brothers are strangled. When Selim dies, Nurbanu must decide how far she will go to secure her son’s reign—and enlarge her own influence. Hughes’s Nurbanu is alert to her political and sexual vulnerabilities, and unsparing as she reflects on the manipulations and sacrifices that have marked her life. The result compellingly interlaces public history and intimate conjecture.