Jason Goodwin Books In Order

Yashim The Ottoman Detective Books In Publication Order

  1. The Janissary Tree (2006)
  2. The Snake Stone (2007)
  3. The Bellini Card (2010)
  4. An Evil Eye (2011)
  5. The Baklava Club (2014)
  6. Yashim Cooks Istanbul (2016)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. A Time for Tea (1990)
  2. The Gunpowder Gardens (1990)
  3. On Foot to the Golden Horn (1993)
  4. Lords of the Horizons (1998)
  5. Otis (2001)
  6. Greenback (2003)
  7. Learning Akka (2015)
  8. The Global Debt Crisis and How We Can Get Out of It (2016)
  9. A Pilgrim’s Guide to Sacred London (2017)

Yashim The Ottoman Detective Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Jason Goodwin Books Overview

The Janissary Tree

When Jason Goodwin explored the Ottoman Empire in Lords of the Horizons, The New York Times Book Review hailed it as ‘a work of dazzling beauty the rare coming together of historical scholarship with luminous writing.’ Now he returns to Istanbul, with a delicious mystery The Janissary Tree. 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 Lastname, 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. And he introduces us to the Janissaries. For 400 years, they were the empire’s elite soldiers, but they grew too powerful, and ten years ago, the Sultan had them crushed. Are the Janissaries staging a brutal comeback? The Janissary Tree is the first in a series featuring the most enchanting detective since Precious Ramotswe of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Splendidly paced and illuminating, it belongs beside Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and the historical thrillers of Arturo Perez Reverte.

The Snake Stone

The captivating return of Yashim, the eunuch investigator from the intelligent, elliptical and beguilingly written’ The Times, London bestseller The Janissary TreeWhen a French archaeologist arrives in 1830s Istanbul determined to track down a lost Byzantine treasure, the local Greek communities are uncertain how to react; the man seems dangerously well informed. Yashim Togalu, who so brilliantly solved the mysterious murders in The Janissary Tree, is once again enlisted to investigate. But when the archaeologist’s mutilated body is discovered outside the French embassy, it turns out there is only one suspect: Yashim himself. The New York Times celebrated The Janissary Tree as the perfect escapist mystery, and The Daily Telegraph called it A tremendous first novel…
Beautifully written, perfectly judged, humane, witty and captivating. With The Snake Stone, Jason Goodwin delights us with another transporting romp through the back streets of nineteenth century Istanbul. Yashim finds himself racing against time once again, to uncover the startling truth behind a shadowy society dedicated to the revival of the Byzantine Empire, encountering along the way such vibrant characters as Lord Byron s doctor and the sultan s West Indies born mother, the Valide. Armed only with a unique sixteenth century book, the dashing eunuch leads us into a world where the stakes are high, betrayal is death and the pleasure to the reader is immense.

The Bellini Card

Investigator Yashim travels to Venice in the latest installment of the Edgar Award winning author Jason Goodwin’s captivating series Jason Goodwin s first Yashim mystery, The Janissary Tree, brought home the Edgar Award for Best Novel. His follow up, The Snake Stone, more than lived up to expectations and was hailed by Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times Book Review as a magic carpet ride to the most exotic place on earth. Now, in The Bellini Card, Jason Goodwin takes us back into his intelligent, gorgeous and evocative The Independent on Sunday world, as dazzling as a hall of mirrors and utterly compelling. Istanbul, 1840: the new sultan, Abd lmecid, has heard a rumor that Bellini s vanished masterpiece, a portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror, may have resurfaced in Venice. Yashim, our eunuch detective, is promptly asked to investigate, but aware that the sultan s advisers are against any extravagant repurchase of the painting decides to deploy his disempowered Polish ambassador friend, Palewski, to visit Venice in his stead. Palewski arrives in disguise in down and out Venice, where a killer is at large as dealers, faded aristocrats, and other unknown factions seek to uncover the whereabouts of the missing Bellini. But is it the Bellini itself that endangers all, or something associated with its original loss? And why is it that all the killer s victims are somehow tied to the alluring Contessa d Aspi d Istria? Will the Austrians unmask Palewski, or will the killer find him first? Only Yashim can uncover the truth behind the manifold mysteries.

An Evil Eye

From the Edgar Award winning author of The Janissary Tree comes the fourth and most captivating Investigator Yashim mystery yet! It takes a writer of prodigious talents to conjure the Istanbul of the Ottoman Empire in all itsmajesty. In three previous novels, Jason Goodwin has taken us on stylish, suspenseful, and vibrant excursions into its exotic territory. Now, in An Evil Eye, the mystery of Istanbul runs deeper than ever before. It’s 1839, and the admiral of the Ottoman fleet has defected to the Egyptians. It s up to the intrepid Investigator Yashim to uncover the man s motives. Of course, Fevzi Ahmet is no stranger to Yashim it was Fevzi who taught the investigator his craft years ago. He s the only man whom Yashim has ever truly feared: ruthless, cruel, and unswervingly loyal to the sultan. So what could have led Yashim s former mentor to betray the Ottoman Empire? Yashim s search draws him into the sultan s seraglio, a well appointed world with an undercurrent of fear, ambition, and deep seated superstition. When the women of the sultan s orchestra begin inexplicably to grow ill and die, Yashim discovers that the admiral s defection may be rooted somewhere in the torturous strictures of the sultan s harem. No one knows more about the Ottoman Empire and Istanbul than Jason Goodwin, of whom JanetMaslin wrote in The New York Times: Mr. Goodwin uses rich historical detail to elevate the books in this series…
far above the realm of everyday sleuthing.

A Time for Tea

Jason Goodwin takes the reader on an adventurous journey through the serpentine paths of the tea trade from China to India to London. Evoking both past and present in this lively and intriguing traveler’s journal, he traces the development of the tea trade from its origins in Canton factories through the Opium Wars and the settlement of British India. His travels take him from the lost European cities of the China coast to inland China, to Calcutta, to India’s high tea gardens in Bohea and Darjeeling. Full of historical and personal detail, A Time for Tea is highly informative, funny, and original. This is more than a travelogue, it is the soul of economic development.

The Gunpowder Gardens

Jason Goodwin, inspired by his grandmothers who spent their lives in China and India observing the custom of afternoon tea, set off to explore the relics of this imperial age and its worldwide trade, delving into the extraordinary history of tea. Evoking a vanished world, he follows the origin of tea, its use, influence and importance, from the the Canton factories through the establishment of British India and the Opium Wars, all the way to that great tea metropolis, London.

On Foot to the Golden Horn

On Foot to the Golden Horn recounts Jason Goodwin’s breathtaking journey with two companions through Eastern Europe from the dikes and marshes of Poland s Baltic coast across to the Golden Horn in Istanbul. Along the way, they sleep in haystacks, drink with Gypsies, and play with Ceaucescu s orphans, meeting with blatant hostility and overwhelming hospitality as an older Europe tries to settle with itself, and a new one struggles to be born. It is the story of three friends walk through some of the world s most beautiful and tragic places, and of their encounters with a varied and vivid cast of characters.

Lords of the Horizons

Since the Turks first shattered the glory of the French crusaders in 1396, the Ottoman Empire has exerted a long, strong pull on Western minds. For six hundred years, the Empire swelled and declined. Islamic, martial, civilized, and tolerant, in three centuries it advanced from the dusty foothills of Anatolia to rule on the Danube and the Nile; at the Empire’s height, Indian rajahs and the kings of France beseeched its aid. For the next three hundred years the Empire seemed ready to collapse, a prodigy of survival and decay. Early in the twentieth century it fell. In this dazzling evocation of its power, Jason Goodwin explores how the Ottomans rose and how, against all odds, they lingered on. In the process he unfolds a sequence of mysteries, triumphs, treasures, and terrors unknown to most American readers. This was a place where pillows spoke and birds were fed in the snow; where time itself unfolded at a different rate and clocks were banned; where sounds were different, and even the hyacinths too strong to sniff. Dramatic and passionate, comic and gruesome, Lords of the Horizons is a history, a travel book, and a vision of a lost world all in one.

Otis

Without it there would be no such thing as a city skyline, or even a city as we know it. Yet Elisha Graves Otis invented the safe elevator almost by accident. He wanted simply to build a machine that would hoist a bedding factory’s equipment safely. He built it, all right and also made possible the construction of the skyscraper and laid the technical foundation for dynamic urban centers around the world. Jason Goodwin’s account of the product and the business that Otis created is an American story of continuous growth and reinvention that continues even today and at an ever faster pace. Founded in 1853 in a ramshackle foundry on the Hudson River in Yonkers, New York, the company survived wars and depressions and transformed itself from a gritty manufacturer into an inventive engineering power and, ultimately, a sophisticated international business. Mr. Goodwin documents its rise with a buoyant mix of enlightened scholarship and charming anecdote, highlighting Otis’s essential technological contribution to the development of the modern city. With 48 pages of rare black and white photographs and illustrations.

Greenback

From the author of Lords of the Horizons, the fascinating story of a new kind of money for a new world Money has always been at the heart of the American experience. Paper money, invented in Boston in 1698, was a classic of American ingenuity and American disregard for authority and tradition. With the wry and admiring eye of a modern Tocqueville, Jason Goodwin has written a biography of the dollar, giving us the story of its astonishing career through the wilds of American history. Greenback looks at the dollar over the years as a form of art, a kind of advertising, a reflection of American attitudes, and a builder of empires. Goodwin shows us how the dollar rolled out the frontier and peopled the Plains; how it erected the great cities; how it expressed the urges of democracy and opportunity. And, above all, Goodwin introduces us to the people who championed or ambushed the dollar over the years: presidents, artists, pioneers, and frontiersmen; bankers, shady and upright; safecrackers, crooks, and dreamers of every stripe. It’s a vast and colorful cast of characters, who all agreed on one thing: getting the money right was the key to unlocking liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Greenback delves into folklore and the development of printing, investigates wildcats and counterfeiters, explains why a buck is a buck and how Dixie got its name. Like Goodwin’s Lords of the Horizons, another story of empire, Greenback brings together an array of quirky detail and surprising often hilarious anecdote to tell the story of America through its best beloved product.

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