Thankyou sipa, i shall be sure to have a look for your reccomended book.
:D

Thanks for the recommendations Malish. Iwill take a look at those books. Another great recommendation for novels set in an Islamic settings are

1) Leo the African (based on the life of Hasan Al-Wazan) by Amin Malouf.
2) Samarkand by the same author.

Enjoy...

Salaam all, How fab- BOOK CLUB.
thank the good lord for places like this.

re: Sipa. I replied to this over somehwere but it got a tad lost so here yougo again..
(sorry if im repeating myself)
Iv actually ordered My Name Is Red from Amazon yesterday.

Also making for excellent reading if you like books based or set in historical setting in the east, a author by the name of David Ball will entertain you for hours..

He wrote two books. The Sword & the Scimitar which is based at the time of the great seige of malta, the battle of the Ottoman Empire against the knights of St John.

It traces a brother & sister & is based on true factual events of the crusade that Dragut Rais led to siege malta & make passage into Europe. in the 15th century

Its an amazing read & takes you across malta, carthage, Istanbul into the courts of Sultan Suleyman the magnificent & through the seas with an army of corsairs into malta..
I mourned this book when it finished...

Also by the same author is a novel called Empires of Sand which is again a novel based on historical facts of the french journey into the sahara to build a north south train link..
It traces two cousins.. one is touareg.. one is aristocrat french.. This book is moving historically correct & w ill have you hooked from start to finish taking you from paris through to the very heart of the sahara dessert in all her glory..

I read and loved it. No heroes, no absolute villians.

ooh! i wanna read it... pamuk is very cool.. i read 'the white castle' and it totally blew my mind... he's like the turkish borges... u get a new meaning out of his books every time u read them

heard of the dude ... but not read that one - a book with a very similar theme is "teh bridge over teh rive drina" by ivo andric