Nicholas Bredie

Booksmith is excited to host Nicholas Bredie in celebration of his debut novel Not Constantinople. Join us!
The story centers around Fred and Virginia, two American expats living in Istanbul and working at the university who come home one night to find their apartment occupied by a family of Greeks. Barred by a quirk of Turkish law from evicting them, Fred comes to a strange kind of understanding with their new squatters; he’s in Istanbul because the pay is good, and with the property in limbo he can ignore the rent, not to mention the paper-writing racket he starts with the Greek patriarch, selling term papers to his own university students.

Between get-rich schemes and run-ins with Kurdish separatists, Fred watches the transformation of his neighborhood from a place with a kind of sad romance to a generic megalopolis, gobbled up by greedy developers and the city’s rapacious elite