RATING: GOOD
SPOILERS!!!
I have to say that the part about Lucy disappearance voluntarily lowers the quality of the novel in my opinion. I didn't like those chapters very much.
What happens to Lucy is that she is so devastated that she can't move from Charlie's grave, feeling bleak and not caring about the very cold weather. It is a man who finds her. A Turk whose name is Murad. He feels compassion and when Lucy refuses to return to the British camp, he takes her to a dacha whose owners abandoned because of the war. Murad belongs to the Turkish army and he is in charge of finding supplies. Lucy insists on staying in the dacha, and Murad visits regularly. She uses the things she finds in the house to survive and Murad brings her things as well.
Then Murad brings a teenager who got injured, and Lucy looks after him. He has a wound in his head, but he gradually recovers. Emir, the young man, is reluctant to interact with Lucy, but he eventually comes out of his shell, and he starts making bread and fishing.
Little by little Lucy realises that she is in love with Murad, and even though she tells herself that theirs could be an impossible love, she can't help feeling like that. It is when Murad takes her to see some monastery that they declare their love for each other. On their return Emir realises what is going on and he gets upset and leaves. Now that they are alone, Lucy and Murad become intimate and spend almost every minute loving each other. Then Murad has to return to the front as the war is reaching its end. For days Lucy waits and she becomes increasingly worried. Then Emir appears, saying that Murad has been injured and is in the Scutari hospital.
Lucy goes there and claims she is his wife so that she is allowed to be with him. It is there that she learns that she is pregnant. Murad is unconscious as she has been wounded in the head, and Miss Nightingale tells her that the brain needs time to recover. When he wakes up, his responses are basic, and he can't talk and simply react instintively. Lucy is told that Murat needs to go to his family, so the hospital arranges for her and Murat to go to his family.
Lucy is welcomed to the family. Some days later she is pleased and surprised to see her sister Dorothea appear. Dorothea got word from her father that her sister was alive and being looked after a Turkish officer. Dorothea tried to find Murad to no avial, and then the port master told her that her sister was in Scutari and it is there where she was told where Lucy was. Dorothea has news; she is to get married to the surgeon, Mr Crawford, in December.
The sisters get to talk and Dorothea says that she is sorry for the way they parted, and she assures her that she wrote to her regularly. Lucy tells her that she is in love with Murad, and this time Dorothea doesn't disapprove, and even when she announces she is with child, Dorothea takes the news pleasantly. As Dorothea has had some experience with patiens with brain wounds, she tells her that Murad needs to be exposed to familiar things, and Lucy and the whole family try to do that. Yet, Murad doesn't improve and he seems to get worse.
Dorothea goes away to get married, promising to return for the baby's birth. She gets married, and she and Gordon Crawford return. Now Lucy has realised that Murad won't be the man she met, and she has lost her husband and lover in just one year. Lucy gives birth to a baby boy, and after that, she has no idea what to do. She could go to London with the child, stay in Turkey, or go to London alone. Lucy doesn't want to live in Smyrna because the way of life for women here is not what she is used to, but she fears what her baby who is evidently Turkish will have to put up with. In the end, Dorothea tells her that she is also expecting, and Gordon is willing to have her, the baby and even their father in his home in Edinburgh. So Lucy decides to go to Edinburgh with the baby, and she promises Murad and his mother that she will return regularly with the baby.
I liked the book, especially the parts about Dorothea, but the romantic side of Lucy and Murad was quite dull for me.
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