For fans of Madame Bovary, Bridgerton, and Madonna in a Fur Coat: a beloved Turkish novel—the most famous in Ottoman literature—about the romantic intrigues of a young woman who wins the heart of a handsome older man living in the biggest palace on Istanbul's Bosphorus waterfront, now in English for the first time and with a foreword by New Yorker writer Merve Emre

A Penguin Classic

When it comes time to marry, there is no better match for the fashionable young Bihter than the handsome widower Adnan Bey: He’s wealthy, he lives in the largest house on the Bosphorus, and he makes her manipulative mother inordinately jealous of her. Yet Bihter’s successful marriage plot does not mean that all is perfect in her new home. Her stepdaughter makes herself Bihter’s rival, and her husband’s nephew ignites in her an overwhelming desire. Having inspired devotion in Turkey for over a century and several film and television adaptations of extraordinary popularity throughout the Middle East, The House on the Bosphorus (or Forbidden Love, as it’s known in Turkey) now takes its place in English alongside Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and The Age of Innocence as one of the world’s great novels of seduction, longing, and social aspiration.