Books by Jeremy Seal

The most dramatic, revealing and little-known story in Turkey's history - which illuminates the nation'Through the spellbinding career of a single, ill-fated leader, Jeremy Seal illuminates a bitterly divided country' Colin Thubron'Read this book if you're interested in Turkey.

This is a captivating mystery of the best kind - the sort that really happened. While walking through a cliff-top graveyard in the village of Morwenstow on the coast of Cornwall, Jeremy Seal stumbled across a wooden figurehead which once adorned the Caledonia, a ship wrecked on the coast below in 1842. Through further investigation, he began to suspect the locals, and in particular the parson, Robert Hawker, of luring the ship to her destruction on Cornwall's jagged shore. Wrecking is known to have been widespread along several stretches of England's coast. But is that what happened in Morwenstow? Seal weaves history, travelogue and vivid imaginative reconstruction into a marvellous piece of detective work.

The course of the Meander is so famously indirect that the river's name has come to signify digression. In this title, at every twist and turn of the author's journey, from the Meander's source in the uplands of Central Turkey to its mouth on the Aegean Sea, he illuminates his account with a wealth of cultural, historical and personal asides.

This is Jeremy Seal's quest, by means of a fez, for the heart of a country culturally and spiritually at odds with herself. The fez's opposing associations - both revered Eastern-Islamic headdress and banal tourist souvenir - exactly reflects Turkey's cultural faultline.