From the the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Part detective story, part historical epic--a bold and brilliant novel that imagines a plague ravaging a fictional island in the Ottoman Empire. It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingheria--the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire--located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives--brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria--the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island--an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader Sheikh Hamdullah, refuse to take...
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