Shortlisted for the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Elif Shafak's The Flea Palace is a moving & highly original novel about a group of individuals who live in the same building & who together become embroiled in a mystery By turns comic & tragic 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 & their families There's a womanizing hard-drinking academic with a penchant for philosophy; a 'clean freak' & her lice-ridden daughter; a lapsed Jew in search of true love; & a charmingly naive mistress whose shadowy past lurks in the building When the rubbish at Bonbon Palace is stolen a mysterious sequence of events unfolds that result in a soul-searching quest for truth' Picaresque' Guardian' Hyperactive & hilarious' Independent