Win a copy of The Architect's Apprentice

'There were six of us: the master, the apprentices and the white elephant. We built everything together . . . '
Sixteenth century Istanbul: a stowaway arrives in the city bearing an extraordinary gift for the sultan. The boy is utterly alone in a foreign land, with no wordly possessions to his name except Chota, a rare and valuable white elephant destined for the palace menagerie.
So begins an epic adventure that will see young Jahan rise from lowly origins to the highest ranks of the sultan's court. Along the way he will meet deceitful courtiers and false friends, gypsies, animal tamers, and the beautiful, mischievous Princess Mihrimah. He will journey on Chota's back to the furthest corners of the Sultan's kingdom and back again. And one day he will catch the eye of the royal architect, Sinan, a chance encounter destined to change Jahan's fortunes forever.
Filled with the scents, sounds and sights of the Ottoman Empire, when Istanbul was the teeming centre of civilisation, The Architect's Apprentice is a magical, sweeping tale of one boy and his elephant caught up in a world of wonder and danger...
This book remains hard to ‘rate' or review - but I will do my best to try and encapsulate my feelings and experience of reading this novel.
This book was passed around the office and no-one else was keen to read it. This is because the pr?cis on the back is uninspiring. The voice of the narrator is used and to be frank it does not hold much allure. The narrator's voice is acutely heard very rarely in the book and the back cover sets a ‘feeling' that isn't really maintained throughout the book.
However; I am a keen reader of pretty much anything (including the back of cereal packets if pushed!), so I thought I'd give it a go. Given that it's taken me three weeks to complete you can guess that it wasn't a compelling read. In fact that was the biggest issue I faced with this book. It was actually OK when I was reading it, but once I'd put it down there was no desire to pick it up again. There was no storyline or character I wished to keep following, or who kept followed me in my ‘non-reading' moments (you know, when you dream of a character, or a place...I love that feeling).
The novel follows the life of a boy/man from childhood through to old age. Jahan is our protagonist and we follow him mainly in his late teens and adult life. His story is almost one of a person who ‘falls on their feet' and has a series of opportune happenings which create the most exiting life - except it wasn't really all that exciting to read about. The narrative is rich and detailed, but I just had no empathy or interest in what happened next in the protagonist's life. I simply did not care.
Another key character in the novel is the elephant, and I think it speaks volumes that I care more about what happened to the elephant than to Jahan. If truth be told many of the minor characters were more interesting than Jahan and I felt offered better opportunities for rich story telling.
The author has taken many historical figures and building and used artistic licence to ‘adjust' timelines to suit the tale. Generally I'm a fan of this technique, but in this novel I felt it fell flat and really seemed to constrain some of the writing.
Some part of me makes me feel that this is actually a good book and that the author is very talented at evoking a scene - so I'm going to loan it out at my book club later this week to see if some of the other readers can elicit more feeling for the book than I did. I'm doubting my own judgement really - perhaps I'm not the target audience (or I've lost my reading mojo!).
I'd have to say don't write this book off - it has moments of magic, but don't be hoping it will be your ‘read of the year' - there's just something missing.