The Janissary Tree: A Novel

Jason Goodwin

Sep 2007 · Yashim the Eunuch Book 1 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Stephen Hoye

About this audiobook

The Janissary Tree, the first book in a new series, is set in a most extraordinary world and features a most extraordinary sleuth. It is 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the Ottoman Empire must follow suit. But just before the sultan announces sweeping changes, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court. Who is behind them? Only one intelligence agent can be trusted to find out: Yashim Togalu, a man both brilliant and near-invisible in this world. You see, Yashim is a eunuch. He leads us into the palace's luxurious seraglios and Istanbul's teeming streets, and leans on the wisdom of a dyspeptic Polish ambassador, a transsexual dancer, and a Creole-born queen mother. He finds sweet salvation in the arms of another man's wife (this is not your everyday eunuch). And he introduces us to the Janissaries. For 400 years earlier the sultan had them crushed. Are the Janissaries staging a brutal comeback?

About the author

Jason Goodwin is the Edgar Award-winning author of the Investigator Yashim series. Goodwin studied Byzantine history at Cambridge and is also the author of Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, among other award-winning nonfiction. He lives with his wife and children in England.

Actor Stephen Hoye is a graduate of London's Guildhall and a veteran of London's West End. An award-winning audiobook narrator, he has won thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards and two prestigious APA Audie Awards.