Years ago, a friend gave me the biography of Abdul Hamid II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire 1876-1909. In it, I found the grain of a story that I wanted to tell. In the summer of 1876, before Hamid took the throne, he had a love story with Flora Cordier, the Belgian owner of a glove store. They secretly married, but then she disappeared without a trace. That's all we know about her and about their story. But what happened to them? What happened to their love?

Of course, we know much more about him. Abdul Hamid II was the last Ottoman Sultan to wield absolute power over the crumbling Ottoman empire. When he took the throne in 1876, he must have sensed that it was beyond saving. Still, he stepped up. He deposed his brother, eliminated his enemies and manipulated the great European powers for thirty-three years. At the end of Abdul Hamid's reign he had earned the nick-name "the red Sultan" - red as in bloody. Was that really the man Flora fell in love with? Was that the man who fell in love with her?

These questions triggered my imagination. The result is a story about Hamid and Flora, loosely inspired by true events. Not a romance, but about love. Mostly, the timeline of events relating to the empire is real and easily retraceable in history books. All the fascinating main characters have existed, their lives described in biographies. The earthquake in the novel took place later, in 1894. Also known as the 1894 Marmara earthquake, it caused widespread damage in Istanbul and the surrounding region with an estimated magnitude of 7.0.

For the rest, we can only imagine.