The cover blurb does its best to suggest that The Turkish Labyrinth is a timely, news-oriented investigation of the rise of Islamic politics in Turkey - it is, but it is a much rounder, fuller, long-lasting book than that summary would suggest. Pettifer has a vivid, immediate style which he exploits to the full as he travels around Anatolia, beginning in Istanbul and moving from Ankara to the Black Sea coast, the troubled south-east and, finally, out of Turkish airspace eastwards to central Asia and westwards to Cyprus, Germany and the UK. He makes effortless connections between Turkey's complex, multi-layered past and its turbulent present, but more importantly, he fills his pages with real, ordinary, contemporary Turks, the sort of people whose voices are too rarely heard on this side of the continent.
