Delphinium Books will publish Princeton resident Katherine Nouri Hughes’s novel The Mapmaker’s Daughter next month. Although the author will not be appearing at Labyrinth until October 9, the book has been receiving impressive advance notice.

According to Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, Princeton University’s Bernard Lewis, “When the fiction is good, the history is usually distorted, and on the rare occasions when the history is good, the fiction is usually less interesting than the straight historical narrative. This novel is a remarkable exception…part history, part fiction, it is enthralling.”

Novelist Edmund White writes, “Of all the appetites the lust for power is the strongest—and most dangerous. This is a lively, absorbing and utterly convincing self-portrait of a woman who came under the influence of the greatest of all Ottoman sultans—with tragic consequences.”

Arnold Rampersad, a former Princeton University faculty member and the author of biographies of Langston Hughes, Jackie Robinson, and Ralph Ellison, calls The Mapmaker’s Daughter “a gorgeous feat of imagination, a stellar work by a gifted writer.”

Iraqi-Irish by birth, Katherine Nouri Hughes attended Princeton University where she received a Masters Degree in Near Eastern Studies and where she serves on that department’s advisory council. She has published two books on k-12 education, was a communications executive in the for-profit and non-profit sectors, and serves on the boards of the American University in Cairo, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and WNET/13, the public television station. She has two daughters and two grandchildren.