His journeys are astral as well as terrestrial, flights through time and space, landings on steeples and treetops in his search for Allah, paradise, and peace. His own sheikh, Ibrahim, who ‘comes to me when I call’, lies in Samarkand, dead for 500 years. Chance encounters, always rich surreal fuel, are the basis of Ali’s parents’ relationship: Akyut, the Kurdish trumpeter in a circus orchestra in Afghanistan, and Mac, the young Melbourne paediatrician whose own mother’s advice on her departure for the wide world was ‘don’t bring home any stray dogs’. Locking eyes over the lion-tamer, the circus performance is ‘a kind of mesmeric fanfare’ to their meeting outside the tent. Three days later they are travelling westwards together.

By the time they reach Iran, Mac knows that the handsome musician is crazy. She discovers his paranoid belief in spirits, Russians, and Nazis, some ‘whose insides were as hot as oxy welders’, or djinns sent by the circus magician. Despite his potential for violence, they marry, and Akyut’s tolerant and loving family welcome them in Istanbul. Mac travels to a hospital job in London, Akyut arrives, and Ali is born. The next journey is the family’s return to Melbourne, but the sometimes confusing narrative jumps from the drug-hazed trip across Asia Minor to difficult times in London, Ali’s Melbourne childhood, later visits to Turkey with Mac, and the last to meet Baba. In Ali’s journey of reconstructing her history, the childhood memories are so vivid, shocking, and detailed that one fears they are autobiographical.

If Baba is intoxicated with raki, hashish, whisky, or heroin, he is equally drunk on Sufism, the mystical, ascetic side of Islam whose adherents believe that paradise lies within the individual. He recalls teaching Ali how to turn, to whirl as a dervish with a circle of salt around a guiding nail driven into the floor. Ali does not remember.

The epigraph about the search for love is by thirteenth-century poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi, the original whirling dervish, whose followers founded a Sufi order after his death. Mac and Akyut visit Tabriz, the home of Shams the wild man of God from the desert, who led Rumi to discover the innermost soul; and then Konya, where Akyut prays at the tombs of Rumi and Shams. The friendship between these two men represented a true merger of personalities, and, following Shams’s disappearance, Rumi falls into an ocean that was Shams. Is this what happens to Baba in his plunge into the sea?

Another poem by Rumi tells of a man jumping into a river, hornets swarming about his head. The water is zikr, or remembrance, and refers to the declaration La illahe illallah, frequently on Akyut’s lips, ‘there is no God but God’. Composed of three parts – the denial, the actual intrusion of the Divine, and the out-breathing of that – it is inspiration as well as conundrum. Perhaps this is one way to view the complexities of Ülgezer’s book. She is writing her doctoral thesis on the Qadiri dervishes of Kurdistan.

Muslims, before prayer, must bathe, and when Baba invites Ali to join him in namaz they walk down the hallway of the seedy rooming house to the communal bathroom where, in unlikely circumstances, she feels that, ‘having never been christened or baptised before’, somehow she ‘was participating in my own belated, watery rites with God’.

Readers may feel compelled to drink many cups of coffee as they plumb the depths of rather too many themes – there are more coffees in this book than in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, former leader in the cup count. Metaphorical extravagance gets away from Ülgezer, overwhelming the novel’s structure, but in describing Afghanistan’s wide spaces, the wharves of Istanbul, or gritty inner-city Melbourne, she is at her best, with wonderful portraits of people and place: grandfather’s ‘moustache beneath the theatre of his prodigious nose’; ‘a speculation of fog’ hanging over the Bosporus; and the seven hills of Istanbul glowing ‘like a vast undulating blanket, knitted with the spores of light’.

And what of salt? The right amount enhances flavour, but too much is harmful. Paulo Coelho observed that memory resembles this aspect of salt; that living too much in the past leads to having no present to remember. The taste of salt winds lingers on Ali’s tongue, and she talks of the salt of certainty, the salt of a tear, the taste of a wound. Istanbul’s seafaring past is captured in ‘the memory of salt, the memory of light’. Salt, a preservative, ensures permanence and even offers protection on London’s icy roads as a praying Akyut hurtles towards the hospital, Mac gasping in labour in the back seat of the car. It is symbolic of fidelity, usefulness, value, and purification – all elements that are present in this singular book.