Dreaming of a better life for her son, Vasfi's mother encourages him to attend medical school, so he can become a great doctor. But Vasfi's infatuation with the beguiling Zeynep, and his fiery temper, destroy this promising future in a night: Quarreling over Zeynep, he kills his cousin in a drunken brawl, and spends the next 12 years in prison.

After his release, he struggles to get by in a world that has moved on without him. He hardly recognizes Zeynep, now a bitter, tightfisted shop owner. Homeless and unable to find work in Ankara or Istanbul, he relies on the kindness of others: an old woman who offers him shelter, because he reminds her of her lost son; a friend from prison who secures him a job as a construction worker.

In this tragic yet vibrant portrait of a life derailed, Suat Derviş offers an insightful, deeply humane perspective on the margins of society.

'Vivid, evocative and tender.' Elif Shafak

'In our family, secrets were buried deep like treasure, never to be spoken of...'

1974. Melike should be happy: school is shut and her parents have stopped hosting parties for their rowdy political friends. But she's scared. She can tell from her parents' urgent whispers about prison, invasion and military coups that Istanbul is changing. So when the family relocate to a quaint village in the south, Melike is hopeful life might get better. And for a while, it does. But then her beloved father disappears...

2003. Nearly three decades have passed, and Melike has done her best to move on. But despite her successful career as an art historian and a husband who adores her, she has always felt a lingering discontent. When she meets mysterious - and extremely handsome - stranger Petro, Melike feels her fortunes changing. But Petro isn't who he says he is. And when Melike uncovers his true identity, she also lays bare a lifetime of hidden pasts...

With a backdrop of the Turkish army's occupation of Cyprus in 1974, Summer Heat explores family secrets, tangled identities and one woman's place in her country's devastating history.

WINNER OF THE 2021 PRIX FEMINA FOR BEST FOREIGN NOVEL

The third volume of the internationally acclaimed Ottoman Quartet, written by Ahmet Altan while he was imprisoned by the Turkish regime

This masterly constructed, sweeping novel centers on the story of Nizam's tormented love affair with a Russian pianist, Anya, and is told against the backdrop of the Ottoman Empire's tumultuous history in the years leading up to WWI.

Underlying the novel's tale of war and love and Altan's absorbing exploration of the inner lives of a vast cast of characters, is a fierce criticism of masculinity and of its degeneration into violence against women, nationalism, and authoritarianism.

Once again, Altan confirms to be an elegant, powerful, and courageous writer, who is not afraid to denounce an arrogant and undemocratic government that, today as a century ago, relies on bigotry, censorship, and intimidation to cling to power and control the lives of its people.

In the two books paired here, translated into English for the first time, the great Turkish writer Ferit Edgü represents complex social and political realities with startling lyricism. The Wounded Age features a newspaper reporter from Istanbul, assigned to write about ethno-national violence in the mountains of eastern Turkey. Like the narrators in Eastern Tales, he is a stranger in a region where a buried history--the state's violence against Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians--continues uninterrupted with the subjugation of the Kurds. Language in this place, especially the language of outsiders, cannot be trusted. In the story Interview, an old villager tells the narrator, Make our photograph, and adds, Send us the pictures. No need to write us letters. The minimal tales Edgü tells are vivid pictures of life in the East--a house in ruins, an empty crib, wolves howling in the hills--and transcriptions of living voices. The reporter in The Wounded Age has no illusions that his story will stop the bloodletting; instead, he goes east because he knows he must open his eyes and unstop his ears.

Lojman tells, on its surface, the domestic tale of a Kurdish family living in a small village on a desolate plateau at the foot of the snow-capped mountains of Turkey's Van province. Virtually every aspect of the family's life is dictated by the government, from their exile to the country's remote, easternmost region to their sequestration in the grim teacher's lodging--or lojman--to which they're assigned. When Selma's husband walks out one day, he leaves in his wake a storm of resentment between his young children and a mother reluctant to parent them.

Written in startling, raw prose, this novel -- the author's first to be translated into English -- is reminiscent of Elena Ferrante's masterful Days of Abandonment, though its private dramas are made all the more vivid against an imposing natural landscape that exerts a powerful, life-threatening force.

In short, propulsive chapters, Lojman spins a domestic drama crystallized through the family's mental and physical claustrophobia. Vivid daydreams morph with cold realities, and as the family's descent reaches its nadir, their world is transformed into a surreal, gelatinous prison from which there is no escape.

From interracial love and sectarian violence to the prospects of Islamo-Christian women's solidarity, the stories and essays in this volume unveil many forgotten features of Ottoman history and Armenian memory. Penned by writer and social advocate, Zabel Yessayan (1878 - 1943?) - now the most recognized author of her generation -, they span the period just prior to the First World War, through the Armenian Genocide, and ultimately the exclusionary 1923 founding of today's Turkey. These hitherto unread, unrecognized, or unknown pieces present the pressing need for unity across imposed identities in the struggle against the horrors of social inequality. As she wrote in support of Muslim women's rights and Armenians' claims for justice, Yessayan also produced this rare and rich archive of the love, hate, and intimacy that defined much of Ottoman subjecthood.

Before or after your tour of Ephesus, you'll enjoy reading these eight stories in an amazing new book by Finlay McQuade. -- Hasan Gülday, Tour Guide -- toursaroundturkey.com

For visitors to Ephesus, Life and Death in Ephesus will be a delightful and enjoyable accompaniment to the many available archaeological guidebooks. The tales give life to the streets and monuments of Ephesus and convey informative insights into daily life in the ancient city. -- Hilke Thür, Archaeologist, Austrian Archaeological Institute

Life and Death in Ephesus is a collection of stories about major events in the history of Ephesus. Characters appearing in these stories include Herostratus, first to commit a herostratic crime; Alexander, the warrior king; Lysimachus, his lieutenant and later his successor; Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, both conquerors of Cleopatra; Heraclitus, the philosopher who said, You can't put your foot in the same river twice; St. Paul, persona non grata in Ephesus; Nestorius, whose characterization of Jesus split the Eastern and Western church-and many more!

Robert Finn's translation of Turkish author Nazli Eray's Orphée makes available to the English-language reader a rewriting of the myth from the perspective of Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus. Eray's surrealistic version takes place in a hot resort town in contemporary Turkey. The setting of an archaeological dig gives a connection to the past and literally to the underworld. Found in the dig is a statue of the Roman emperor Hadrian, who proceeds to offer an unusual perspective on modern life and values through mysterious letters carried by a messenger pigeon. Eray also comments on modernity, as the city of Ankara emerges as a character in the novel's fantasy. Set in junta-ruled Turkey of the 1980s, the novel takes its place as a crucial slice of Turkish literary history.

Resonating with haunting references to the film Last Tango in Paris, the novel evolves as a mystery story with a humorous bent. Thus Eray illuminates her insatiable curiosity about other cultures, particularly those of the West. Finally, the style of the translation is simple and clear, with crisp dialogue. Sibel Erol, professor of Turkish literature at New York University, has written an introduction that places this fantastic plot in a literary context, as well as in understandable terms that relate to the reality of today's Turkey.

Are you ready for a bite of chocolate on a long strange trip in the heat of the night? If so you are ready to read Merih Günay's three connecting novels in one enthralling collection.

In Sweet Chocolate at the center of things is a difficult, contradictory, complex, self-centered, failed spirit who, after having spent too much time in seclusion, tries again to find his place in the midst of life.

In A Long Strange Trip as much as the first-person narrator believes he despises ordinary life, he, however, gradually finds himself confronting the fact, as painful as it is liberating, that this is precisely his greatest asset. He then goes on to attempt to transform despair and resignation into a will to live and gain strength.

When it comes to In the Heat of the Night we are confronted by mothers kissing their neatly dressed children on the cheek and sending them off to school, the smell of fresh bread, a steaming kettle, flowers blooming under the snow, germinating seeds, foals preparing for races and chicks being fed. Somewhere, undoubtedly in the background, someone is bound to be listening to Dean's songs. There is yesterday, today and maybe tomorrow. There are people who are among us and those who are no more. A new beginning where there is certainly a forgetting of everything or without the forgetting of anything.

Among Murathan Mungan's signature works, Cenk Hikâyeleri (Valor: Stories) has long been considered a milestone of twentieth-century Turkish literature. The six short stories in the collection reflect the author's multiethnic background (which includes Kurdish, Arab, and Turkish heritage) and represent his lush poetics, literary breadth, and sociopolitical commitments.

Valor reimagines Shahmaran, a mythical half-human, half-snake figure that commonly appears in the folklore of Turkey's southeastern provinces. Legend interweaves with the contemporary realities of ethnicity, religious dogma, gender, and sexuality. Uncovering hidden narratives within a rich and complicated culture, Mungan's stories depict self-realization and sexual awakening as they showcase one of Turkey's most popular literary voices.

This is a classic novel set in the late Ottoman Empire. Oshagan's Remnants: The Way of the Womb, Book 1 (Mnatsortats in the original Armenian) is his magnum opus and the culmination of a series of powerful, innovative novels on Muslim-Christian, and especially Turkish-Armenian, relations in the Ottoman Empire. Remnants is a literary reconstruction of the pre-genocide world of the Armenians told through the horrific collapse of a family, the Nalbandians. The author intended the novel to be divided into three parts (Part I: The Way of the Womb; Part II: The Way of Blood; Part III: Hell) but was unable to write the third part, which was to be devoted to the extermination of the Armenians, depicting the twenty-four hours during which the Armenian population of Bursa was annihilated. This is by far one of the most important, innovative novels ever written on the Ottoman Empire and social relations among its diverse Muslim and Christian populations. This work has been translated into English by a preeminent scholar and mainstream translator, G. M. Goshgarian.

A celebratory dinner and engagement ceremony is to be held at a large home in Our Village, in southeast Turkey. Halil, the cousin of the future bride, Leyla, is sent to a nearby village to buy the traditional cologne. Leyla's sister, Maral, is told to go door-to-door to remind everyone to attend. Throughout the long day, the other women of the household clean, cook and toil. Meanwhile, a dust storm descends out of nowhere and a menacing mist settles over the village streets.

This harrowing tale, which spans sixteen hours and is told through the eyes of a mysterious narrator, delves into the bad blood between two timeless villages where most of the men are heavily armed village guards, and there is money to be made in agriculture, oil, fish farms and more. Geographical complexities, tangled relations, hazy memories and unreliable witnesses make for a story in which perhaps nothing is as it seems...

Based on the true story of the May 2009 massacre of over forty people, including women, children and infants, in a village in the south-eastern province of Mardin, Turkey.

Ada is haunted by her yearning for Istanbul and by the scars of a nightlong interrogation following her arrest at the Gezi Park protests. Now in London temping at an art fair, she meets Lucian, an eccentric, charming but burnt-out gallerist. Since his divorce, Lucian has been relying on drugs and alcohol to mend his broken heart. Ada, meanwhile, dreads the verdict of her forthcoming trial in Istanbul. Day-by-day, as their passion deepens, they reassess their past choices, and their futures rapidly take shape.

Sensual, perceptive and at times bitingly funny, The Fugitive of Gezi Park explores the nature of trauma and struggle, asking what it takes of us to start all over again.

In 2013, police brutality against a peaceful group protesting the destruction of Gezi Park - one of the few public green spaces in Istanbul - prompted an unprecedented wave of demonstrations which spread rapidly across Turkey, lasting several weeks. The Gezi Park Protests are a pivotal moment in the country's volatile recent history, and continue to carry huge sentimental value for the dissidents of the 'New Turkey.'

The book was published on the 10th anniversary of the start of the protests, and in the year of a pivotal election in Turkey.

Reviews

The Fugitive of Gezi Park is a gripping, sometimes comic and more often tragic portrayal of two complex, flawed characters and cities. Without ever mentioning Erdoğan's name, it offers a finely grained study of how Turkey's descent into dictatorship has torn through human lives. The TLS

A sensitive account of how our lives are shaped, on both individual and societal levels, by accident as much as willpower, and by how we deal with the consequent moments of trauma: fight, flight or, most often, neither. ArtReview

Beautifully captures the endless possibilities that the city offers its inhabitants - chance meetings, unlikely romances and an opportunity to rebirth yourself, over and over. nb. Magazine

In her second novel, Turkish-British writer Deniz Goran explores with humour and poise the difficulties of shaking off guilt. Monocle

A bitingly funny satire of the shallow art world, and a reflection on exile, trauma, displacement, desire - and the direction of Erdoğan's Turkey. SAGA Magazine

Set in the dreamscape of the contemporary art world and combining crisp, affectionate class satire with a cinematic storyline and exquisitely observed characters, The Fugitive of Gezi Park is an intense meditation on love, fealty, trauma, exile, politics, and art. An elegant and incisive novel from an incandescent talent. May-Lan Tan, author of Things to Make and Break

A young woman, bearing the aching wound of her country, realises the deep connection between the freedom she seeks for her homeland and that of her own body and soul. Through powerful language Deniz Goran brings together two cities, and two people oscillating on the pendulum between hope and despair, preparing them for a new life. Burhan Sönmez, award-winning author and President of PEN International

Fabulous. Mariella Frostrup

In this novel, Dursaliye Şahan gives place to the young suicides witnessed by the Turkish society in London for a while as well as the social, political, economic and traditional relations behind it. In the novel, the relations behind the gang reality in London are discussed together with the immigration phenomenon.