The Architect’s Apprentice by ELIF SHAFAK

Sixteenth century Istanbul: a stowaway arrives in the city bearing an extraordinary gift for the Sultan. The boy is utterly alone in a foreign land, with no worldly possessions to his name except Chota, a rare white elephant destined for the palace menagerie.

Filled with all the colour of the Ottoman Empire, when Istanbul was the teeming centre of civilisation, The Architect’s Apprentice is a magical, sweeping tale of one boy and his elephant caught up in a world of wonder and danger.

“There were six of us: the master, the apprentices and the white elephant. We built everything together. Mosques, bridges, madrasas, ravanserais, alms houses, aqueducts…

I think about Istanbul every day. People must be walking now across the courtyards of the mosques not knowing, not seeing. They would rather assume that the buildings around them had been there since the time of Noah. They were not. We raised them: Muslims and Christians, craftsmen and galley slaves, humans and animals, day upon day.”