Fred and Virginia, two expats living in Istanbul and working at the university, come home one night to find their apartment occupied by a family of Greeks. Barred by a quirk of Turkish law from evicting them, Fred comes to a strange kind of understanding with their new squatters; he’s in Istanbul because the pay is good, and with the property in limbo he can ignore the rent, not to mention the paper-writing racket he starts with the Greek patriarch, selling term papers to his own university students.

Between get-rich schemes and run-ins with Kurdish separatists, Fred watches the transformation of his neighborhood from a place with a kind of sad romance to a generic megalopolis, gobbled up by greedy developers and the city’s rapacious elite. Lauded by T.C. Boyle as "tight and imaginative," Not Constantinope is the story of a city in transition and the uncertainty of life in a foreign country.