Maureen Freely's ENLIGHTENMENT in The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal's Weekend Journal gives notice to Maureen Freely's novel Enlightenment in a review by Melik Kaylan, "Radical Idealists in a Hard World: "Novelist Maureen Freely tracks the lives of a handful of friends in Istanbul, half of them Turkish and half American. The novel opens in the post-9/11 present and traces back the story to the eve of a military coup in the early 1970s, when the friends are innocent teenage radicals immersed in Marxist chic. Over time, their lives and loves are ruined by traitors in their midst. It is a promising-enough scenario, one that also prompts a certain amount of ancillary curiosity. What will Ms. Freely have to tell us about Turkey, that most confusing and contradictory NATO ally? Although an American -- now based in England, where she is a senior lecturer at the University of Warwick -- Ms. Freely grew up in Turkey, where her father, John Freely, teaches physics and is the author of celebrated guidebooks about the country. She has also translated books by Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk in recent years: Will her work show his postmodern influence? Part mystery story and part spy thriller, Enlightenment centers on an apparent political murder committed by the group in 1971 and the fate, 30-plus years later, of two members who disappear consecutively at a U.S. Customs checkpoint into the post-9/11 security maze."