The Loved Boy and the Teacher

Author's name: Elif Shafak

Translated by: Dr. Muhammad Darwish

The Passionate Boy and the Teacher is a novel by Elif Shafak. The worlds of this novel are strange and wonderful, as the novelist moves here to the world of the Ottoman Sultans as seen by Cihan, the Indian boy who came from India with an elephant, a gift to present to the Ottoman Sultan. He also encounters the events, intrigues and conspiracies he encounters in Istanbul while working as an elephant tamer and groom in the Sultan's palace. He also loves the Sultan's daughter, a love that completely took over him from the first moment he saw her, in addition to his work as a student in construction under the supervision of his teacher, Mimar Sinan, whose name was immortalized in many Ottoman monuments with amazing architectural designs. A novel full of characters, including the noble and the lowly, the honest and the thief, the honest and the drunkard, the good and the bad, the kind and the evil, the pious and the sinful, the oppressor and the oppressed, the ruler and the ruled, the honorable and the homosexual, and countless places, such as palaces, seas, prisons, brothels, inns, bars, ships, carriages, cities, countries, villages, countrysides, bridges, battlefields, arenas of war, war and peace. It contains human and inhuman feelings of love, hate and passion.