[1] Set in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, The Blinding Order is a parable about the use of terror by authoritarian regimes,[2] and it is linked through its main subplot to the author's banned 1981 novel The Palace of Dreams.

[citation needed] The plot centres on a religious order issued by a Sultan, calling for all people with the "dubious power"[4] of the evil eye to be blinded, and the subsequent terror campaign that follows.

[5] Describing the novel as "superbly plotted" and "charged with bitter black humor," Kirkus Reviews praised it as "a masterly parable worthy of comparison with José Saramago's Nobel-anointed fiction.

[3] Boyd Tonkin from The Independent described it as "a chilling fable of inscrutable tyranny and collective surrender".

According to him, it gives "literary form" to the "horror of the sabotage-accusation"-which numerous people in socialist countries fell victim to.