A new book on Turkey, which I first came across in an email on Friday, seemed to be everywhere over the weekend. In From Life Itself (Profile Books, £12.99, May 7), Suzy Hansen, an American journalist who lived for more than a decade in Istanbul, tells of the rise of authoritarianism under Erdogan through the microcosm of life in one district, the old Ottoman one of Karagümrük.
The email, from Hansen’s publisher in the US, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, had a link to an interview with the author. On Saturday, in The Guardian, Sami Kent, reviewing the book, said it was “lovingly written and well observed”. In the FTWeekend Magazine, there was an extract from the book itself, telling how Karagümrük “had weathered the shock of a decade of Middle East conflicts and a president with a taste for radical reinvention”. As soon as I logged on this morning, I saw a few lines from another review in The Wall Street Journal. And Hansen, I see, is the latest guest on Turkey Book Talk, a podcast “featuring conversations with journalists, academics and writers on Turkey and its region”.

Also in the FTWeekend, in the travel pages, there was an extract from Cal Flyn’s new book, The Savage Landscape (which I mentioned last week). In it, she heads to Iceland for a close encounter with a volcano — “and finds herself in the footsteps of writers and painters eager to experience the ‘delightful horror’ of the sublime”.