Adianez

The Turkish Lover, the third installment of Puerto Rican writer Esmeralda Santiago’s memoirs, is the story of her love affair with Ulvi Dogan, a Turkish man 17 years older than her. Initially he provides an escape from her family home but soon winds up being even more demanding than her mother. The story begins in Brooklyn, passes through Miami, and finishes in Massachusetts, where Santiago graduated magna cum laude from Harvard.

It is November 25, 1960, and the bodies of three beautiful, convent-educated sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. El Caribe, the official newspaper, reports their deaths as an accident. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of General Raphael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship.

Abdi Nor Iftin first fell in love with America from afar. As a child, he learned English by listening to American pop and watching action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. When US marines landed in Mogadishu to take on the warlords, Abdi cheered the arrival of these Americans, who seemed as heroic as those of the movies. Sporting American clothes and dance moves, he became known around Mogadishu as Abdi American, but when the radical Islamist group al-Shabaab rose to power in 2006, it became dangerous to celebrate Western culture.