Asya is the bastard of the title and not only does she not live with her father, she has no idea who her father is. That's a secret known only to three people; her mother, the man who is her father, and her oldest aunt Banu. Banu is blessed and cursed with the ability to read people's futures in a small way, and can find out the answers to any questions about the past that she cares to if she is brave enough. Ever since the two djinni came to live on her shoulders, Miss Sweet and Mr. Bitter, she hadn't known a moment's peace from the past.
It's her own fault, she knows, but she has to ask, and Mr. Bitter has lived longer than long and has borne witness to everything, and his bitterness is the truth. With her grandmother's memory lost to Alzheimer's, her mother wrapped up in worshipping a son she hadn't seen in twenty years, her middle sisters lost to reality, her youngest sister running from the past as hard as she can, and her nineteen-year-old niece asking why she should care about history if she doesn't even know who her father is, who else is there but her to bear the burden of the family's and Turkey's histories?
When Armanoush (or Amy as her mother calls her) is nineteen she decides that she has to go to Turkey and see her past for herself. Going to Istanbul to find the places her grandmother's family once lived will be the only way she feels that she can understand who she truly is. Of course who else would she stay with but her stepfather's family? Telling her mother she's spending spring break with her father, and her father that she's decided to spend spring break with her mother, she flies to Istanbul to uncover her past, and inadvertently sets off a sequence of events that brings all of their pasts home to roost.
It's all very well and good to write a novel where actual history and fictional history intersect, and the attitudes of a country are reflected in the microcosm of the characters, but the trick is to make it worth reading beyond the political or social points that the author wishes to make. Elif Shafak has succeeded in this task because her primary concerns are the people in the book and telling their stories. Initially it seems like the book is populated by extras from one of Hollywood's "ethnic" movies, two-dimensional characters whose only personality stems from their ethnicity.
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