Using his experiences from living and working in Istanbul, Turkey for many years, Bynom’s The Executioner’s Race begins with a female calligrapher who is condemned to death in fourteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul for blasphemy when she turns holy prayers into images of faces and animals. Her only chance at life is win a race against a Bostanci, one of the sultan’s guards and executioners, but what is the outcome? That’s what Hans Christian Andersen tries to find out seven years later with the help of a dubious florist.
