It is 1492, and Andalusia is being destroyed the victims have no one to look to except for a Sultan a sea away. The Gates of Heaven is a work of historical fiction about the story of the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Andalusia and Ottoman Sultan Bayezid IIs humanitarian rescue of these victims of persecution from the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. Set against the historical backdrop of the fall of Granada, Columbus voyage to the New World and the advent of the printing press, this epic novel brings to life a lesser known, yet no less important, episode in the history of the encounters between the Ottoman Empire and Europe in vivid detail. An epic tale of adventure from the Atlantic to the far reaches of the Mediterranean, The Gates of Heaven is also an ode to lost Andalusia and a tale of humanitarianism so often not heeded even in the twenty first century.
Beyazit Akman is a bestselling novelist of historical fiction and professor of English literature. He earned his M.A. in English literature at Illinois State University, as a Fulbright Scholar in 2006, and completed his Ph.D. at the same university in 2012. In 2010, he was awarded the prestigious Smithsonian Baird Society Fellowship in Washington DC. He taught at State University of New York, Geneseo, as a visiting professor from 2012 to 2014. He started writing historical fiction after years of archival research at university libraries in the United States. His first novel, 1453 The Conquest, was an instant success and became one of the bestselling novels for a first-time author in his native Turkey. It has become a contemporary classic and has inspired many historical TV series, movies and novels, and launched a new era of historical fiction in Turkey. He is currently an assistant professor of English Literature at the Social Sciences University of Ankara.