Gardens of Water - Alan Drew

Gardens of Water by Alan Drew billed as 'a major summer read for 2008' and apparently  'perfect for fans of Khaled Hosseini and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie', one of whom I love, the other, well, only half a Kite Runner flown here.Something interrupted that read and I never returned, please convince me because then perhaps I'll read A Thousand Splendid Suns too.
But yet another excellent book to emerge from my recent reading broth of three contemporary books in one go. I was on a roll as I read fifty pages from one, forty from another, seventy from the next and just rotated until I'd finished them all, the secret is certainly to masochistically put a book down when you reach a really exciting bit. I love doing that.
From India post-partition in The Age of Shiva to Turkey post-earthquake and turmoil of a similar nature, one politically man-made the other an Act of God, both having devastating effects on the lives of the people. In stark contrast to Meera in Manil Suri's book, Gardens of Water is a story of strict religious convention and a forbidden love as a Kurdish family struggle to survive something which has torn their known world apart. As Sinan and Nilufer's daughter Irem falls in love with the son of an American aid worker, the earthquake is readily mirrored in the Richter scale emotional aftershock it creates in everyone's lives. Whilst other boundaries may have crumbled and dissolved, Sinan's Muslim faith must hold fast under huge pressure, but for how long?
The analogy of the magma, which eventually just has to rise to the surface with explosive force through the broken crust of Sinan's world, was never far from my thoughts as I read.
Would the foundation of his faith be sufficient to sustain the onslaught?
Alan Drew handles his material with evident ease, flowing writing and a sense of place and faith gathered from living in Turkey for several years and obviously with his eyes open to the nuances of the country and its people his notebook handy to log it all. The book held me completely spellbound, plenty of gripping moments at which to torture myself and put the book down and with a mounting tension that left me with a growing sense of dread and unease as I read.
I couldn't figure what might happen but I knew something would and I sensed when it did it might be as catastrophic as the earthquake itself, was I right?
You'll have to read and find out, great Summer holiday reading indeed, but perhaps not if you're going to Turkey.