Forty Thorns

Adalet grapples tremendous change. Hers is the universal 20th century woman’s dilemma of repeatedly repositioning herself. As she is forced out from the western provinces of the weakening Ottoman Empire and into the heart of Anatolia and the establishment of the new Turkish Republic, Adalet embodies both the dreams and struggles of the 20th century woman. She is disowned for her love. She fights for the new ideals of tomorrow and for her children. She is engendered by war and an era that gave Turkish women a secular voice even before much of the west. But she never is able to buck the traditions and dilemmas faced by a woman determined to own her independence. Adalet was born into the grace and education of high Ottoman society, where European ideals fostered the uprising of the Young Turks. She is one of the many builders, wives, and mothers of the new state whose bold pride secured a revolution. As Adalet's life folds dreams into deception, love into rejection, and birth into loss it is her inner strength, a spirit forged in both East and West that stands down and rebuilds from the deception, vice, jealousy, rejection, and the loss of one child and the death of another. Can she find the inner strength she needs? In a collision of East and West, the fantastic tales of Adalet’s story connect as intricately as designs in Anatolia’s carpets. She moves from harem to skyscraper, from star-crossed girl who elopes with the blacksmith’s son to a governor’s wife to a divorcee who finds herself penniless by mid-life. Can she outlive the losses? Will her spirit prevail?