Flea Palace

By turns comic and tragic, Elif Shafak''s The Flea Palace is an outstandingly original novel driven by an overriding sense of social justice.

Bonbon Palace was once a stately apartment block in Istanbul. Now it is a sadly dilapidated home to ten wildly different individuals and their families.

There''s a womanizing, hard-drinking academic with a penchant for philosophy; a ''clean freak'' and her lic...