Book review: Sailing through Byzantium, By Maureen Freely
Orient excess: high times and deep waters by the Bosphorus
At the hottest moment of the Cold War, as the Cuban missile crisis reaches its climax on 27 October 1962, a group of hedonistic artists, aristocrats, American expatriates, international spies and shady local hangers-on gather for a glamorous End of the World Party in Istanbul's old bohemian quarter on the shores of the Bosphorus. Fifty years later, Mimi, who was ten at the time and spent the evening cowering tearfully under the piano, returns to try to make sense of her tangled memories.
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