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The Lion House

By: Christopher de Bellaigue
Narrated by: Barnaby Edwards
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Publisher's summary

"Christopher de Bellaigue has a magic talent for writing history. It is as if we are there as the era of Suleyman the Magnificent unfolds."—Orhan Pamuk, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Narrated through the eyes of the intimates of Suleyman the Magnificent, the sixteenth-century sultan of the Ottoman Empire, The Lion House animates with stunning immediacy the fears and stratagems of those brought into orbit around him: the Greek slave who becomes his Grand Vizier, the Venetian jewel dealer who acts as his go-between, the Russian consort who becomes his most beloved wife.

Within a decade and a half, Suleyman held dominion over twenty-five million souls, from Baghdad to the walls of Vienna, and with the help of his brilliant pirate commander Barbarossa placed more Christians than ever before or since under Muslim rule. And yet the real drama takes place in close-up: in small rooms and whispered conversations, behind the curtain of power, where the sultan sleeps head to toe with his best friend and eats from wooden spoons with his baby boy.

In The Lion House, Christopher de Bellaigue tells not just the story of rival superpowers in an existential duel, nor of one of the most consequential lives in human history, but of what it means to live in a time when a few men get to decide the fate of the world.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2022 Christopher de Bellaigue (P)2022 Macmillan Audio
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What listeners say about The Lion House

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all about warfare and conquest

struggle to finish some well written passages but not a strong plot.a fair way to get to know the middle eastern culture

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Hmm

I wanted to enjoy this book but the narration never allowed me to fully engage. The story was not unfamiliar to me but it felt disjointed.

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    4 out of 5 stars

good but left Alot of meat on the 🦴

good storyline it jumps around to different characters stories which I don't mind but, just didn't give me the ending I wanted and not as much details towards the ends of characters.. Good but not great

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Too much detail?

Very well researched and extraordinary detail. I would have preferred to hear more about the interaction of Suleiman and his children than was presented in this book. The reader was great.

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Amazing Magical Storytelling

Welcome to History as Storytelling &if you've never heard of it before or heard it before or experienced exactly how history can be framed as a kind of Wizard of Oz movie in your imagination; then you are in for a treat.

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2 people found this helpful

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Palace, intrigue

Most of this is about the people who rule the empire in the name of the sultan. There is one interesting campaign to take Venice that was sidelined because of poor mapsand the heavy artillery ending up in a swamp. Without this mishap, Venice, history could have changed radically.

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very boring it reads like a text book

save your money its like a text book, just fact and history no plot no story line

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