Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Oracle of Stamboul | 2011 | Michael David Lukas | Buy |
| 2 | The Last Watchman of Old Cairo | 2018 | Michael David Lukas | Buy |
Michael David Lukas has published two standalone novels set in different historical periods of the Middle East. The Oracle of Stamboul (2011) is set in the late nineteenth century and follows Eleonora Cohen, a young Jewish girl who travels from a Romanian port city to Istanbul, where her unusual intelligence brings her into the orbit of the Ottoman Sultan. The novel has a fairy-tale register and draws on Lukas’s research into the Ottoman Jewish community.
The Last Watchman of Old Cairo (2018) is a more ambitious work, structured around three interlocking narratives: a medieval Jewish scholar in Cairo, a nineteenth-century Scottish scholar and Jewish woman, and a present-day American student investigating his family’s Egyptian Jewish heritage. The connecting thread is an ancient manuscript guarded by a family of watchmen over generations. The novel is concerned with questions of cultural memory, religious identity, and the fragility of historical documents.
Both novels are rooted in careful historical research and share a preoccupation with Jewish communities at the edges of empires. They can be read in either order, but the debut is a more accessible starting point for readers new to Lukas’s work.