Turkey is a land torn between East and West, and between its glorious past and a dangerous, unpredictable future. After the violence of an attempted military coup against President Erdogan in 2016, an event which shocked the world, journalist and novelist Kaya Genc travelled around his country on a quest to find the places and people in whom the contrasts of Turkey's rich past meet. As suicide bombers attack Istanbul, and journalists and teachers are imprisoned, he walks the streets of the famous Ottoman neighborhoods, telling the stories of the ordinary Turks who live among the contradictions and conflicts of Anatolia, one of the world's oldest civilizations. The Lion and the Nightingale presents the spellbinding story of a country whose history has been split between East and West, between violence and beauty - between the roar of the lion and the song of the nightingale.
Weaving together a mixture of memoir, interview and his own autobiography, Genc takes the reader on a contemporary journey through the contradictory soul of the Turkish nation.

Kaya Genç is a journalist, novelist, and essayist from Istanbul. He holds a PhD in English Literature and he is the author of four books, The Lion and the Nightingale (I.B. Tauris, 2019), Under the Shadow (I.B. Tauris, 2016), An Istanbul Anthology (American University in Cairo Press, 2015), and Macera (YKY, 2008). He has contributed essays and articles to the world's leading magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and The Financial Times. The Atlantic selected Kaya's writing for the magazine's list of "Best Journalism Works of 2014".