In FTWeekend, the novelist Elif Shafak offered “A love letter” to Istanbul, a place that has been present in nearly all her stories, “not as a background décor, but as a character in her own right, a she-city”.

Coincidentally, in the books pages, Nadia Beard‘s review of a slim volume by Milan Kundera, published in English for the first time, appeared under the headline “Kundera’s love letter to Prague”.

In the same paper, Stephen Smith reviewed Lance Richardson’s biography of Peter Matthiessen, True Nature (Chatto & Windus). It is, he says, a “carefully cross-hatched study of his subject [which] depicts him in the wild, in all habitats and seasons… Matthiessen never fulfilled his early promise of writing the great American novel, but the story recounted in Richardson’s pages is of a very considerable American life.”