On the eve of a coup d’etat, the wife of a diplomat newly returned to Turkey from the United States finds that the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fuat, is in fact a childhood friend. Having married more for status than love, and quizzically unmoored from the reality of day-to-day existence in the capital, she begins to nurse an impossible love for her husband’s superior, and in the process of telling us of her Bovary-like, novelistic infatuation, she confesses innumerable details of her life: her tomboyish school years, her independence and ambitions as a young woman, her surprise at her own willingness to set aside her aspirations to enter the comfortable world represented by her husband. Set against the backdrop of the great cultural changes occurring in Turkey during the 1960s, <em>Music by My Bedside</em> is a compelling and often playful journey through one woman’s off-kilter view of herself, the world, and the conventions by which she is constrained.