A new book by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Part detective story, part historical epic--a bold and brilliant novel that imagines a plague taking over a fictional island in the Ottoman Empire. It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingeria--the 29th 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 H, refuse to take precautions...
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