Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

Midnight at the Pera Palace is a nonfiction book by Charles King, Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University. It’s about one of the most fascinating cities in the world, Istanbul, still known officially as Constantinople in the period the book covers. The Pera Palace is the hotel where many foreigners stayed, but also Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The book is about the tumultuous period when the Ottoman Empire came to an end and the Turkish Republic was declared. It’s an unlikely book to have a Netflix series based on it, and the series bears little relation to the book, except the title and the focus on the hotel, which you can still stay at today.