Three young women and the extraordinary Madam Lilla embark on a road trip from Tunisia to Lebanon as the Arab Spring breaks around them. The novel’s title is taken from a sura in the Koran that warns to beware of those ‘women who blow on knots’ because they do witchcraft. The women all set out for different reasons but each holds a secret that drives them forward. It is only as they travel further across the desert that Madam Lilla’s dark intentions become clear and their quest begins hurtling towards an unimaginable end. Unique and controversial in its country of origin for its political rhetoric and atypical Muslim female characters, Ece Temelkuran weaves an empowering tale that challenges us to ponder not only the social questions of politics, religion and women in the Middle East, but also the universal bonds of sister- and motherhood.

A literary discovery: an uproarious tragicomedy of modernization, in its first-ever English translation
Perhaps the greatest Turkish novel of the twentieth century, being discovered around the world only now, more than fifty years after its first publication, "The Time Regulation Institute" is an antic, freewheeling send-up of the modern bureaucratic state.
At its center is Hayri Irdal, an infectiously charming antihero who becomes entangled with an eccentric cast of characters--a television mystic, a pharmacist who dabbles in alchemy, a dignitary from the lost Ottoman Empire, a "clock whisperer"--at the Time Regulation Institute, a vast organization that employs a hilariously intricate system of fines for the purpose of changing all the clocks in Turkey to Western time. Recounted in sessions with his psychoanalyst, the story of Hayri Irdal's absurdist misadventures plays out as a brilliant allegory of the collision of tradition and modernity, of East and West, infused with a poignant blend of hope for the promise of the future and nostalgia for a simpler time.