The novel “The Istanbul Bastard” tells the story of two families—Turkish and Armenian—separated by dramatic events at their homeland in the early twentieth century. No one in these large families even suspects that the tragedy of the past has tightly bound them with invisible threads. But now an American woman of Armenian origin, Armanush, arrives in Istanbul from San Francisco. She wants to unravel the knot of family secrets and find out who she truly is. In Istanbul she stays with the Turkish relatives of her stepfather, where she meets her peer—nineteen-year-old Aсiya. The girls quickly find common ground, despite the fact that they were raised and educated differently, and despite their different attitudes to historical truth…