The Veiled Lady, and Other Men and Women

A window onto a vanished world of exotic intrigue, these late 19th-century tales transport readers to the sun-drenched streets and shadowed bazaars of Istanbul, where a painter sketching at a mosque catches his first glimpse of the legendary Veiled Lady of Stamboul. Yuleima appears like a phantom in silk, her beauty so devastating that Joe Hornstog, the painter's Levantine dragoman, immediately senses danger and warns of the police closing in. What follows is a heady mixture of longing, cultural collision, and narrow escape in a city where Western desire meets Eastern mystery. The surrounding stories continue this thread of charming adventurers navigating exotic locales, their encounters charged with both romantic possibility and mortal peril. These are period pieces, written with the confident narrative voice of an era that saw the Ottoman Empire as a land of danger and desire in equal measure. For readers who want to step inside the Orientalist imagination that shaped a century of Western literature about the East.