Istanbul Love Bus, a novel
A Cold War hippie romance...
On a visit to Istanbul in 2016, standing in Sultanahmet Square, I reminisced on what it had been like in 1968 when I first saw it: a sleepy, untouristy historical park surrounded by hippy microbuses. That same day the reminiscence came to life like a video, characters appeared and began to act, and I wrote it all down. Two weeks later, when I left Istanbul, I had 30,000 words of a novel, now entitled Istanbul Love Bus.
That novel, now 80,000 words (282 pages), takes place in Turkey—mostly Istanbul and Edirne:
Flora, a beautiful hippy artist from California (you've met her briefly in Paris Girls Secret Society, my first-published novel) meets Julien, a young French sculptor in Paris. They run away to Istanbul, meet other hippies, and head for Kathmandu, but destiny has other plans for them. Bruce, a graduate student waiting to be drafted for Vietnam, meets Sarah, a US Peace Corps teacher in Istanbul, and together they encounter Nur Baba, a Sufi Hurufî mystic with the ability to read people's destiny in their faces. Meanwhile, a Cold War drama is taking place under cover that could result in the total destruction of one of the world's greatest works of art....
Buy the eBook (ePub) edition right here:
PayHip
Amazon (Kindle eBook or paperback)
