100 Best Turkish Books of All Time

1

Madonna in Fur Coat

Sabahattin Ali

Every day, always in the afternoon, he goes there, slowly but with great impatience, as if looking at the pictures in the corridors, he forcibly restrains my steps, trying to reach his main goal, gazing at the “Madonna in a Fur Coat” I was standing in front of as if it had caught my eye, until the doors closed. I was waiting.

Some passions be our guides along our lives. He wraps us in his arms. We follow them with no interrogation, and we know that we will never regret it. Revealing the invisible faces of people in his works, Sabahattin Ali is inspired by a strong passion in this book.

2

snow

Lisa See, Janet Song,

A spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings – for love, art, power, and God – set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order; by the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature.

From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings–for love, art, power, and God–set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order.

Following years of lonely political exile in…

3

My Name Is Red

Orhan Pamuk and Erdag Gokna

At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.

The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book celebrating the glories of his realm. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous…

4

The Forty Rules of Love

Elif Shafa

In this lyrical, exuberant follow-up to her 2007 novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, acclaimed Turkish author Elif Shafak unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives—one contemporary and the other set in the thirteenth century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz—that together incarnate the poet’s timeless message of love.

Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent. Her first assignment is to read and report on Sweet Blasphemy, a novel written by a…

5

Time Regulation Institute

AHMET HAMDI TANPINAR

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, who uses a symbolist language in his poems, preferred a realistic style that deals with social problems in his novels.

The Time Regulation Institute is a bedside novel that examines the Turkish people’s confusion between east and west.

The Clock Adjustment Institute takes its content and subject from the novel’s characters Nuri Efendi (Clock Master), Mubarak (An old English-made wall clock with feet), Halit Ayarcı and clock-time-human relations.

The narration, combined with Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s unique symbolist narrative and evolving from time to time…

6

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

Elif Shafak

An intensely powerful new novel from the best-selling author of The Bastard of Istanbul and Honor

‘In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila’s consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore. Her brain cells, having run out of blood, were now completely deprived of oxygen. But they did not shut down. Not right away…’

For Leila, each minute after her death brings a sensuous memory: the taste of spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the long-awaited birth of a son; the sight… more

Recommended by Nicola Sturgeon, Jonny Geller, Peter Florence, and 3 others.

Nicola Sturgeon
This is the book I’m most looking forward to over the next few weeks. @Elif_Safak is one of my favorite contemporary writers and this is a brilliant review in @FT – “10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World – lush, rich, lucid” https://t.co/jNww8EtC7e (Source)

Jonny Geller
This beautiful book by the inspiration Elif Shafak is published today. Please: Buy it. read it. Recommend it. You won’t regret it! https://t.co/UgATb1Ihre (Source)

Peter Florence
I’m intrigued by the fact that this is a second or third language; she seems to have absolute control of the poetry, and at the same time the ability to conjure characters who, in a way, absolutely don’t feel at all like characters. They feel like people. It’s a great trick of fiction, and she does it beautifully. (Source)

 

7

Those Who Can’t Hold

Oguz Atay

Berna Moran describes Tutunamayanlar, one of the most important works of Turkish literature, as “a rebellion both in what it says and in its way of saying it”. According to Moran, “Oğuz Atay’s humor, sensitivity and technical subtleties have made Tutunamayanlar the product of a great talent, and this competence in the work has brought the Turkish novel into line with the understanding of the contemporary novel and has given it a lot.” Atay, who cleverly mocks the petty-bourgeois world, “makes his attack with a novel that the adherents will not understand and reject.” The Untouchables won the 1970 TRT Novel Award.

8

The Museum of Innocence

Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely

“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.”

So begins the new novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize, from the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name Is Red.

It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal, scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins ​​violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the…

9

The Bastard of Istanbul

Elif Shafak

From one of Turkey’s most acclaimed and outspoken writers, a novel about the tangled histories of two families.

In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country’s violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the “bastard” of the title, Asya, a nineteen-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul: Zehila , the zestful, headstrong youngest sister who runs a tattoo parlor and is…

10

The Devil Within

Sabahattin Ali

“I found a permanent person responsible for my words and actions, which I didn’t know if I wanted it or not, but which I claimed I didn’t want if the results were against me: I used to call it the devil inside me. I considered my soul worthy of compassion and care. However, what the devil, my dear, what the devil? This is a fabrication of our pride, our stupidity… The devil inside is a not-so-cunning evasion… There is no devil inside us… We have the helpless inside……

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11th

İnce Memed 1 (İnce Memed, #1)

Yasar Kemal

Written over a thirty-two-year period, the Ince Memed quartet is the story of Memed, who rebelled against the order, and Çukurova with its human relations, nature and colors. In the words of Yaşar Kemal, it is the novel of a person “born with a wolf of rebellion”, a “forced man”.

Having to leave his village due to the cruelty of Abdi Ağa, Memed kidnaps Hatçe, who is about to be married to Ağa’s niece. Memed, who injured Abdi Ağa and killed his nephew, joins the bandit Deli Durdu, but leaves Deli Durdu with his two friends, where he can’t stand the cruelty. When Memed was an ordinary village boy,…

12

A Strangeness in My Mind

Orhan Pamuk

Arriving in Istanbul as a boy, Mevlut Karataş is enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He becomes a street vendor, like his father, hoping to strike it rich, but luck never seems to be on Mevlut’s side. He spends three years writing love letters to a girl he he has seen just once, only to elope by mistake with her sister. Although he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have together, Mevlut stumbles toward middle age as everyone around him seems to be reaping the benefits of a rapidly modernizing Turkey. Told through the eyes of…

Recommended by Zitto Kabwe Ruyagwa, and 1 others.

Zitto Kabwe Ruyagwa
@raziakkhan Saw Pamuk on your shelf. Have fallen in love with Pamuk’s work. I see you have Istanbul and The Black book. I high recommend you get A strangeness in my mind and Snow. Unputdownable https://t.co/uMyiHNNfHk (Source)

 

13

The Black Book

Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely

A New Translation and Afterword by Maureen Freely

Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel–loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband or Celal, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celal, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celal’s identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Victor pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the…

Recommended by Emin Gün Sirer, and 1 others.

Emin Gün Sirer
This is like an adaptation from an Orhan Pamuk book. fantastic project. https://t.co/aRBhNbKJDp (Source)

 

14

Istanbul
Memories and the City

Orhan Pamuk

A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy–or sadness– that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire.With cinematic fluidity, Cotton moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the…

15

honor

Elif Shafak

An honor killing shatters and transforms the lives of Turkish immigrants in 1970s London

Internationally bestselling Turkish author Elif Shafak’s new novel is a dramatic tale of families, love, and misunderstandings that follows the destinies of twin sisters born in a Kurdish village. While Jamila stays to become a midwife, Pembe follows her Turkish husband, Adem, to London, where they hope to make new lives for themselves and their children.

In London, they face a choice: stay loyal to the old traditions or try their best to fit in. After Adem abandons his…

Recommended by The CEO Library Community (through anonymous form), and 1 others.

The CEO Library Community (through anonymous form)
One of the best 3 books I’ve read in 2019 (Source)

 

16

Wren

Resat Nuri Guntekin

It is Reşat Nuri Güntekin’s best-known work, which was first serialized in the newspaper Vakit in 1922. The adventure of Feride, a young, crazy girl who is a graduate of French High School, starts with her being a teacher in a small village in Anatolia, leaving her fiancee and family in Istanbul after a deep disappointment. Later this village is followed by other towns and cities. Wherever he went before, the effects of the War of Independence are seen, traces of difficult conditions and misery are seen. Later, the difficulties of a young, lonely and independent girl from a different culture in social life, the conflicting value…

17

Kuyucakli Yusuf

Sabahattin Ali

“In this meaningless and alien life, he truly clung to one thing, as if he truly believed. This was his wife. Muazzez’s presence wasn’t a big, fill-in-the-blank thing for Yusuf, but his absence was terrific. It was so painful that he was cut off from Yusuf’s life for no reason, so ruthlessly. He knew that what he was looking for in his life was not Muazzez, but he thought that without Muazzez he would not be able to seek it.”

Kuyucaklı Yusuf is perhaps the most romantic hero of Turkish literature. Against the cruelty of life and people…

18

The White Castle

Orhan Pamuk, Victoria Holbrook

From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Borges, Nabokov, and DeLillo comes a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating work of historical fiction and a sinuous treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West.
In the 17th century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople. There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja– “master” –a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to…

19

Dangerous Games

Oguz Atay

It is a striking and shocking novel that invites one to fight and defeat oneself, to perceive one’s self-transformation as a vital problem. The protagonist of the novel, Hikmet Benol, while investigating the reality underlying the intense turmoil in society, senses that sincere dealing with the facts is seen as dangerous by the rulers of the society, and explores ways to deal with and live as if ‘playing a game’. And it goes as far as it can go on a road full of both ‘dangerous’ and ‘game’…

20

Red Haired Woman

Orhan Pamuk

Does the first love experience determine a whole life?

Or is it only the power of history and legends that determines our destiny?

Orhan Pamuk’s new novel “The Woman with the Red Hair”, published by Yapı Kredi Publishing, drags us in pursuit of a great human crime with a shocking love story of a high school boy living in a town near Istanbul thirty years ago.

In the mid-1980s, while Mahmut Usta and his apprentice “little gentleman” Cem, who dug wells with the traditional method, were looking for water in a difficult land, a mysterious theater woman in the yellow tent just outside the town
…

Don’t have time to read the top Turkish books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

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Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what’s important to know
Interactive exercises: apply the book’s ideas to your own life with our educators’ guidance.
21

Misty Atlas of Continents

Ihsan Oktay Anar

While the Janissaries were pushing the door, Uzun İhsan Efendi was still thinking about the obvious issue, but he could not get out of it…
“Is Rendekar telling the truth? I think therefore I am. Pretty reasonable. But from this it follows the opposite, that I do not exist, that I am a dream: I am thinking of a thinking man. Because I know what I’m thinking, I exist. Because I know you’re thinking, I know this man I’ve been dreaming of exists, too. So it becomes as real as I am. After that, it comes to a much sadder conclusion. I’m dreaming that this man I think he’s thinking is dreaming of me. So the real one…

22

All His Poems

Orhan Veli Kanik

Orhan Veli: The “chainbreaker”, “the one who wears a cap”, the “the one who civilizes”, the “the outdoor poet” of Turkish poetry…

“Orhan Veli took a step further: He showed that poetry does not have a language of its own, a meter of its own, and that it will not have its own subjects, and he explained that harmony and music can also be removed from poetry.”
-Nurullah Atac

“Orhan Veli’s fight is the biggest fight in our literature, I believe it. He lowered the bed of the river into a more natural valley. He dressed the poem in a cap and civilized it. Today’s poetry yields are a bit more productive of him.”
-Cemal Sureyya

 

23

Kids Today Are Great

Dear Nesin

Today’s Children Are Wonderful is a book written by Aziz Nesin in 1967. In this book, two children named Ahmet and Zeynep break up and tell each other about their experiences through correspondence. Ahmet and Zeynep used to study at the same school, but Zeynep later moved to Ankara. They promised to write letters. In addition, Zeynep has a brother named Metin and Ahmet has a brother named Fatoş. Ahmet tells Zeynep and Zeynep tells Ahmet about the events they experienced at school and at home. Like what happened to them, their friends, their friendships. How this book teaches mothers, fathers and teachers of children…

24

serenade

Zulfu Livaneli

In this heartbreaking Turkish novel based on the real-life sinking of a refugee ship during World War II, an elderly professor leaves America to revisit the city where he last glimpsed his beloved wife.

Istanbul, 2001. Maya Duran is a single mother struggling to balance a demanding job at Istanbul University with the challenges of raising a teenage son. Her worries increase when she is tasked with looking after the enigmatic Maximilian Wagner, an elderly German-born Harvard professor visiting the city at the university’s invitation. Although he is distant at first, Maya gradually…

25

The Architect’s Apprentice

Elif Shafak

From the acclaimed author of The Bastard of Istanbul, a colorful, magical tale set during the height of the Ottoman Empire

In her latest novel, Elif Shafak spins an epic tale spanning nearly a century in the life of the Ottoman Empire. In 1540, twelve-year-old Jahan arrives in Istanbul. As an animal tamer in the sultan’s menagerie, he looks after the exceptionally smart elephant Chota and befriends (and falls for) the sultan’s beautiful daughter, Princess Mihrimah. A palace education leads Jahan to Mimar Sinan, the empire’s chief architect, who takes Jahan under his…

26

Sons and Offended Spirits

Alper Canigü

“Five years is the most mature age of man; Then it starts to rot.
I’m Alper Kamu, I turned five a few months ago. As my birthday approached, I spent most of my time in front of the window, watching the people outside. They lived on, speeding up, slowing down, making all kinds of noises and looking somewhere. It made me sick to think that one day I would become one of them. Unfortunately, there was no escape from it. Time was cruel and I was aging rapidly. The only good thing in my life was that I didn’t have to go to kindergarten anymore. Profit from loss. For a long time, I told my parents that kindergarten was a…

27

Waiting for Fear

Oguz Atay

Oğuz Atay’s stories do not lag behind his novels in terms of depth of understanding of daily life, richness of expression and energies in taking the reader away. The protagonist of the story that gave the book its name, who locked himself in his house while waiting for fear, is one of the biggest proofs of Atay’s difference in the literary route. So is the “Man in the White Coat”, which the author created with the first story in this book.

28

Cevdet Bey and His Sons

Orhan Pamuk

This great novel, which brought Pamuk his first fame, tells the seventy-year adventure of a family from Istanbul.

This book, which tells the adventures of a family from Nişantaşı for three generations since the beginning of the 20th century, determines the colors of the interiors of the houses, the flow of time, and ordinary daily conversations through the heroes that are remembered, while giving the reader all the pleasures to be taken from the traditional novel. In the last years of the Abdülhamid era, the passion of Cevdet Bey, one of the first Muslim merchants of Istanbul, who owns a small shop, is to expand and enrich his business, as well as to be modern in a “Western sense”…

29

Speech

Kemal Ataturk

This work, which was written by Atatürk himself, was named NUTUK because it was read by Atatürk in the second congress of the Republican People’s Party held in Ankara between 15-20 October 1927, which lasted 36.5 hours and was read in six days.

I went to Samsun on the 19th of May, 1919. Situation and general view:

The group to which the Ottoman Empire was included was defeated in the General War, the Ottoman army was damaged on all sides, and an armistice with a heavy sharia was signed. During the long years of the great war, the nation was tired and poor. Folks…

30

Quiet House

Orhan Pamuk

Three grandchildren, one historian, one revolutionary, and one determined to become rich, visit their grandmother in the town of Cennethisar near Istanbul, and stay for a week in the house their grandfather had built when he was exiled seventy years ago because of politics. During this time, while his grandmother’s ninety-year-old past is slowly being parted, it is remembered that his grandfather wrote a great encyclopedia that he thought would bridge the gap between East and West in one fell swoop. Witnesses who bridge generations with their silent observations at home, and behind the garden walls, passionate young people who take care of the family…

Don’t have time to read the top Turkish books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what’s important to know
Interactive exercises: apply the book’s ideas to your own life with our educators’ guidance.
31

Poems of Nazim Hikmet

Nazim Hikmet, Randy Blasing, Happy Guest Blasing, Happy Guest

A centennial volume, with previously unavailable poems, by Turkey’s greatest poet. Published in celebration of the poet’s one hundredth birthday, this exciting edition of the poems of Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963) collects work from his four previous selected volumes and adds more than twenty poems never before available in English. The Blasing/Konuk translations, acclaimed for the past quarter-century for their accuracy and grace, convey Hikmet’s compassionate, accessible voice with the subtle music, innovative form, and emotional directness of the originals.

32

Last Train to Istanbul

Ayse Kulin, John W. Baker

International bestseller by one of Turkey’s most beloved authors
As the daughter of one of Turkey’s last Ottoman pashas, ​​Selva could win the heart of any man in Ankara. Yet the spirited young beauty only has eyes for Rafael Alfandari, the handsome Jewish son of an esteemed court physician. In defiance of their families, they marry, fleeing to Paris to build a new life.

But when the Nazis invade France, the exiled lovers will learn that nothing—not war, not politics, not even religion—can break the bonds of family. For after they learn that Selva is but one of their…

33

İnce Memed 2 (İnce Memed, #2)

Yasar Kemal

Written over a period of thirty-two years, the İnce Memed quartet is the story of Memed, who rebelled against the order, and Çukurova with its human relations, nature and colors. In the words of Yaşar Kemal, it is the novel of a person “born with a wolf of rebellion”, a “forced man”.

His brother Hamza takes the place of the murdered Abdi Ağa. Memed kills Ali Safa Bey and Hamza, who persecute the villagers of Vayvay to seize their lands. However, although it turns into a legend for the villagers, he begins to doubt that the persecutors will not end with killing. Abdi Ağa went, Hamza took his place, he was replaced…

34

Peace

AHMET HAMDI TANPINAR

Tanpınar sees our culture as the manifestation of an “inner world civilization”. This civilization was created by people who had a certain morality, “believed in their spiritual duties, passed through a certain spiritual order, and trained their souls”.

Mümtaz, one of the heroes of Huzur, is looking for an “internal order” that will bring him “peace” throughout the novel. Disease, death, nature, cosmic elements, civilization, social issues, various moods and aesthetic ideas are intertwined in the work. However, it is the love between Mümtaz and Nuran that dominates the novel above all this. Istanbul, where this love is lived…

35

Human Landscapes from My Country
An Epic Novel in Verse

Nazim Hikmet, Randy Blasing, Happy Guest

When, on the eve of the Second World War, Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963) — Turkey’s most acclaimed and popular poet — was sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison for his Communist beliefs, he embarked on the writing of his epic, Human Landscapes from My Country. This 17,000-line verse-novel is made up of a traveler’s vivid encounters with Turkish men and women from all walks of life. In colloquial language, Hikmet stages their private hopes and griefs, and through these many human dramas, he documents Turkey’s historic transformation into a secular republic. Human Landscapes from My…

36

wild

Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu

A village in Central Anatolia during the National Struggle. Ahmet Celal, who carries the extensions of the socio-psychological characteristics of the Tanzimat intellectual. Typical intellectual who sees himself as a savior, who has made it his duty to educate (or dedicate) the people, and becomes “alien” as a result of the conflict between the reality he has created in his mind and the reality he has lived.

Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, who stepped into the Turkish literature scene with his poems, stories, articles and critical articles written for magazines with great productivity in the first half of the twentieth century, is one of our most important writers with his novels, stories, essays, plays and memoirs

37

Homeland Hotel

Yusuf Atilgan

Zebercet is the hero of a “neither dead nor alive” life. He shares the same fate with the Anayurt Hotel, where he first opened his eyes and lived: days spent in similar temporary relationships, a lonely and lonely life.

Coming by the delayed Ankara train, the woman whose name we do not even know stays at the hotel for one night, and
the content of the silent days of both Zebercet and the Anayurt Hotel changes.

The anger and desperation of a life driven by obsessions in the monotonous infallibility of small details are both great.

An unforgettable type of Turkish literature and …

38

Love Quotes

Cemal Sureya

Cemal Süreya was the most special “vitamin” of the Republic Period poetry.
A lush river of lyric, erotic, political.
“Sevda Sözleri” brings together all the poems of this great master.
Such a totality that it is warm, enchanted and immortal…

39

The New Life

Orhan Pamuk

The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk’s fiendishly engaging novel is launched into a world of hypnotic texts and (literally) Byzantine conspiracies that whirl across the steppes and forlorn frontier towns of Turkey. And with The New Life, Pamuk himself vaults from the forefront of his country’s writers into the arena of world literature. Through the single act of reading a book, a young student is uprooted from his old life and identity. Within days he has fallen in love with the luminous and elusive Janan; he witnessed the attempted assassination of a rival suitor; and forsaken his family to travel…

40

Our Great Despair

Baris Bicakci

A close friendship… Actually, the story is their story, that of Ender and Çetin… One day, a young girl enters their life. Now is the time to think, remember and scrutinize yourself.

“We looked different to Nihal than we were from the beginning. That’s how it was needed. Two middle-aged, experienced men who are protective, watchful, cold-blooded, know what to do, laying asphalt so that Nihal can walk properly, finish university without delay, and take reasonable steps away from the disaster she experienced. One has a belly, the other is bald.”

Barış Bıçakçı, from the rhetoric of this age; language, emotion, thought pollution…

Don’t have time to read the top Turkish books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:

Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what’s important to know
Interactive exercises: apply the book’s ideas to your own life with our educators’ guidance.
41

Ninth Foreign Ward

Peyami Safa

One of Peyami Safa’s masterpieces, Dokuzuncu External Ward has an important place in Turkish literature as it is “the first novel that wanders in the depths and labyrinths of the human soul” and deals with a sick person and his psychology. Considered a first in Turkish literature by many researchers and writers, Dokuzuncu External Ward is a work that can be shown as evidence of the existence of the Turkish novel, although there is no other work in terms of both quantity and quality, as Tanpınar says, “the only book of pain and suffering”. The young hero of the novel is at his feet…

42

Three Daughters of Eve

Elif Shafak

The stunning, timely new novel from the acclaimed and internationally bestselling author of The Architect’s Apprentice and The Bastard of Istanbul.

Peri, a married, wealthy, beautiful Turkish woman, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrests it back, a photograph falls to the ground—an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor. A relic from a past—and a love—Peri had tried desperately to forget.

Three Daughters of Eve is set over an evening in contemporary Istanbul, as…

43

Early Losers

Emrah Serbes

This time, Emrah Serbes, whom we know with Ankara detective stories, takes the wheel and tackles another issue that has not been covered in our literature. We enter the energetic, sad, tricky world of boys… The
father is working, the mother is a housewife, the stronghold of conservatism… Workers, the poor, aunts, brothers… Tough men who cry easily… Rural sparseness, the crowd of the neighborhood… Jealous, proud, naive adolescents… Emrah Serbes, quick-tempered Angry, easy-going, seductive boys talk… These are sad, touching funny stories…

“Change of index to index, …

44

Those crazy Turks

Turgut Ozakman

The novel of one of the most legitimate, moral, just and holiest wars in the world, the first liberation war fought and won against imperialism, a nationalization revolution, is an astonishing recent epic…

· The product of Turgut Özakman’s efforts for more than fifty years.
· A detailed, multi-faceted story of our National Struggle that can be easily read like an adventure novel and has never been written before.
· A narrative of proud and exemplary facts, facts and events based on real documents, that draws people in, surprises, excites, makes one cry, and arouses them.

46

Stuntman’s Dilemma

Murat Mentes

“Murat Menteş is a reader, argumentative, quarrelsome, that is, a provocative writer friend of mine. You bloom when you quarrel with it. I am also watching his writing adventure with interest. Let me tell you up front, I don’t like fictitious, completely imaginary texts, but the power of Murat Menteş’s sentences one after another turned my complaint into a delusion. When I was Murat’s age, I struggled with words like a butcher; On the contrary, Murat whips up words and organizes them into sentences, and he achieves this very skillfully. That’s why Stuntman’s Dilemma is a very lively, colorful book with subtle philosophical cries…

48

Kinyas and Kayra

Hakan Gunday

I have no sleep. I can’t sleep at all. I drink like a pig. But I can’t even keep my eyes closed. It’s five hours in the morning. I’m thinking of my mother. Where is he now? Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror. And even if I don’t say a word, my body is enough to describe what I’ve been through, what I understand from life. The butterfly I drew on my right shoulder, the cross I threw on it because I didn’t like it, and the same butterfly was embroidered much better under it by a Japanese. A bullet wound two fingers above my left elbow. Thirty-four stitches on my wrists. My appendix surgery proved that I licked civilization once, like everyone else…

49

A Season in Hakkari

Ferit Edgu

Alternative cover for ISBN: 9789755702858

It is not enough to consider “O” [A Season in Hakkari] not just a realistic novel, it is an astonishing story in which reality turns into an incredible dream. I admired Ferit Edgü’s skill in turning a real life into a novel. Because “He” takes his power of observation from his mastery of narrative.
– Melih Cevdet Anday

“A Season in Hakkari”, whose film won four awards at the 1984 Berlin Film Festival, has been translated into various world languages, including Chinese and Japanese.

50

My Brother’s Story

Zulfu Livaneli

It all starts with the murder of a young woman in a quiet fishing village. This murder is instrumental in meeting the retired civil engineer and the young, beautiful and curious journalist girl who has withdrawn from the world. Thus begins the story, where fiction and reality are mixed, and the darkest and most secluded areas of emotions are entered, or rather a story within a story. The doors of a modern Arabian Nights Tale are opened. However, this time Scheherazade is a man.

My Brother’s Story invites those who believe that love is the ultimate in happiness, to think again, about love, the complexity of love…

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51

What Lives What Lives What Doesn’t Live

Dear Nesin

Aziz Nesin Yaşar first wrote Ne Yaşar Ne Yaşamaz as a radio play. He turned it into a stage play on top of his great success. He wrote the script on insistence; As with most theater actors, this time he did not receive the copyright from the filmmaker. His comic was published in a weekly newspaper. Then he wrote the television script. As the demands of the readers and the pressure of the environment increased, Yaşar Yaşamaz became the novel you hold in your hands now.

Meral Çelen, who wrote the introductory article of the book, explains this great interest in Yaşar Yaşamaz’s words as follows:
“
…

52

Memories of a Dinosaur

Mina Urgan

Our ‘doyen of English literature’, Mîna Urgan, is before us this time with her memories as a master of living. In Memoirs of a Dinosaur, Mîna Urgan tells in an open-hearted, plain and naive language; himself, those around him and what is going on in a geography… A life enriched by Halide Edip, Necip Fazıl, Abidin Dino, Neyzen Tevfik, Sait Faik, Yahya Kemal, Ahmet Haşim, Atatürk and many other names…

I saw ‘Oğuz Atay’ on his feet so rarely that I had only one impression of him: He looked just like a huge cat. It looked like a very big and very beautiful cat that…

53

Glass Mansion

Sabahattin Ali

Sabahattin Ali’s stories, which were published collectively and stand against time, are now presented to the reader as separate books. In one of them, Sırça Köşk, there are tales such as Orange, Killer Osman, Bahtiyar Dog, Lifeguard, and a White Ship, as well as a Love Tale, Sırça Köşk, Tale of Giants.

54

Last Island

Zulfu Livaneli

An allegorical and shocking novel from Livaneli…

A putschist president, to spend his retirement years, settles on a paradise island where everyone is happy with everything. The President is determined to use his destructive potential, which is deeply ingrained in his soul, by taking advantage of his past political power. In this direction, it initiates interventions that will affect the entire candidate.

These interventions, which seemed ordinary at first, will eventually reach the point of making the enemy hurt the enemy. All living things, including the island people, especially the seagulls, will take their share of the President’s cruelty. In the meantime, this seemingly unstoppable trend…

55

Her name is
Aylin

Ayse Kulin

…A mahogany coffin, with its lid open, stood on the raised stage. A long line of people greeted the American officer in the colonel’s uniform lying in the coffin, prayed or said goodbye to them, and when they left the coffin, they came with their burning hearts and took their places in the living room. Everyone was crying silently, as if they were blessing the dignity of the prevailing army order…

Lying in the coffin, adorned with colorful flowers, on top of the catafalcon, he looked more like a Hollywood star lying there for a movie shoot than a soldier. This colonel is in uniform…

56

Portrait of a Turkish Family

Irfan Orga

a XXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXX if if X if if rr I yx xxx xxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx NEW YORK THE MAGMILLAN COMPANY 1950 if 3f PORTRAIT OF A TURKISH FAMILY . To Margarete, my wife, with love 10. Contents 1 Introducing the Family 1 2 An Autocrat at the Hamam 1 1 3 A Purely Masculine Subject 26 4 Sariyer 37 5 The New House and Other Things 52 6 The Changing Scene 64 7 Week-End Leave and the New Bride 78 8 Muazzez Makes Her Debut 93 9 A Long Farewell 101 10 Trying to Build Again 113 11 The End of Sariyer 127 12 Disillusionment of an…

Recommended by Norman Stone, and 1 others.

Norman Stone
It’s by a man called Irfan Orga and it’s called Portrait of a Turkish Family. It was a bestseller in the 1940s and is still on sale. Orga was from a good Ottoman family. They lost everything in the [First World] War and he ended up in an orphanage. He went into the army and became a Turkish fighter pilot. He fell in love with an Irish girl, but if you worked in the Turkish state you couldn’t… (Source)

 

57

Leaf Fall

Resat Nuri Guntekin

In Yaprak Dökümü, Reşat Nuri Güntekin skillfully describes the collapse and disintegration of a family of civil servants due to the lack of income and philanthropy. It is a novel with a social aspect. The strangeness of the new life determined by the changing socio-economic conditions of a small bureaucrat who adheres to the old customs and morals is successfully exhibited.

58

Hell Flower (Alper Kamu, #2)

Alper Canıgüz

“You know, people are born and die and then grow up.”

The world’s smallest detective is back.

Alper Kamu is still 5 years old, 9 years later.

Together with Alper Kamuz, the unique hero of Alper Canıgüz,
we are embarking on a new journey full of black humor in pursuit of broken lives, ash-blown loves and many more mysteries in an atmosphere where all kinds of violence prevail.

As our hero struggles to uncover the truth behind this time around the death of a child and an old love story, “A murder if it doesn’t take our understanding of humanity a little further…

59

bliss

OZ Livaneli

Fifteen-year-old Meryem lives in a rural village in Eastern Anatolia, Turkey. Her simple, conventional way of life changes dramatically after her uncle, a sheikh in a dervish order, rapes her–and condemns her to death for shaming the family. Asked to carry out the “honor killing” is his son Cemal, a commando in the Turkish army.

So begins a long, mystifying voyage for Meryem as her shell-shocked cousin ushers her to the shining metropolis of Istanbul where another troubled soul, the Harvard-educated professor Irfan, embarks on his own journey of transformation–one that catapults…

60

they are silent

Ihsan Oktay Anar

This novel is the words of a “silent” who dreams in purple. You will be a guest in the humble world of a man who sees what he hears, listens to what he sees, conceals what he hears with the magic of silence and tells the magnificence of all this, as the lines flow. He, on the other hand, will accompany you with a mischievous smile, silently… As you consume the pages one by one, you will be shimmering in the “reality” of unique purple dreams, and your head will be dizzy from these dreams. You will hear the voices of all the heroes of this world, as real as life, as incredible as a dream, and feel their breathing. Because Suskunlar,…

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61

Stories of Efrasiyab

Ihsan Oktay Anar

Aptülzeyyat, who took this book and examined it after gathering his courage, saw that it was a work called World History. The ghost awakening from its metaphysical slumber in one book must have considered it appropriate to continue the same sleep in another book. When Aptülzeyyat, who was devastated and exhausted after all he survived, curled up on his mattress in that warm room, he saw himself in his dream, just like that ghost, in World History, but as a hungry bookworm. He began to eat, biting into the large print word “forbidden fruit” on the first page. On the second page, he tasted the “torment of the fall.” “The flesh of Christ”…

62

Samovar

Sait Faik Abasıyanık

“Sait Faik was an honorable man, he remained honest throughout his life. He was not content with being just honest, he used the measure of honor in evaluating people. (…) also remained honest in his writing style until the end of his life. He never tried to garner attention and applause by surprise, by making big words, by appearing to be the defender of great causes… He said it outright, without being too small to embellish…”
-Yaşar Nabi-

“… Those who cannot forget small things are those who cannot forget the most backward memories. In the face of this unfortunate force of their memories, no country, no homeland can hold every place,…

63

Dear Cheeky Death

Latife Tekin

“I was born in 1957 in Karacefenk village of Bünyan town of Kayseri. I started school as soon as I learned to walk. The school was the boys’ room in our house. I learned to read and write while playing with demons under the cedars. Under the cedars, jinns and fairies lived in Blackcefen. My childhood passed among them. I secretly joined their association. I visited their house. I went to their wedding. I learned their language, their day and night games. My father used to work in Istanbul.

Now I forget who told me that my mother was a strange woman with a broken heart. She reads, writes, sews, needles, Kurdish and…

65

Idle Man

Yusuf Atilgan

A man who stands “against” everything, “opposes”, “against” everything… The Lonely Man… He doesn’t even have a name. “C.” says Yusuf Atılgan briefly.

How can a person lead an “against” life without being “against” himself when he is so “against” everything?

C. can’t stand mediocrity, monotony, and convenience of the ordinary. He is looking for both the different and the right one. He also knows that his efforts are in vain.

A difficult character, a difficult life, a simple novel.

66

Farewell
A Mansion in Occupied Istanbul

Ayse Kulin and Kenneth J Dakan

Set in Istanbul during the last days of the Empire, Ayşe Kulin’s novel recounts the collapse of the Ottomans… It is a story of human suffering and tragedy…

By choosing to tell her story of an era through the eyes of a particular family living in a particular mansion in a city besieged, Ayşe Kulin follows in the tradition of the great historical novel.

67

Pity

Resat Nuri Guntekin

In this work of Reşat Nuri Güntekin, published in 1928; It tells the dramatic life stories of Zehra Teacher and her father Mürşit, who are hardworking, successful, but ruthless towards those who show weakness.

While the author describes the conflicts and incompatible relationships of a newly graduated, idealist young property owner in business and social life before the republic, he also gives important clues about the civil service life and old-fashioned structure of the period. As he drifts from city to town, leaving his principles behind one by one, the young man is dragged to a terrible end with a faulty marriage.

68

İnce Memed 3 (İnce Memed, #3)

Yasar Kemal

Written over a thirty-two-year period, the Ince Memed quartet is the story of Memed, who rebelled against the order, and Çukurova with its human relations, nature and colors. In the words of Yaşar Kemal, it is the novel of a man who is “born if he has set up a rebellion inside him”, and of a “forced man”.

Çiçek Mahmut Ağa expels the villagers who cultivate their lands in the Çiçekderesi village, for protecting İnce Memed. Thereupon, Memed Cicek killed Mahmut Agha. The doubts of the persecutors that they will not end in killing turn into hope with the idea that “even if one İnce Memed goes, a thousand Memeds will take its place”.

69

Fairy Soda

Ercan Kesal

“Our conscience is drying up. Are you aware that the breasts on which orphaned children, who lost their fathers early, will put their innocent heads, have already collapsed? As the chest collapses, the persecution remains above us. Our curved and entangled past has become the wires of our corrupt order. That’s why the voices you hear are so deep and deep.

If you want to look at the will of a Hittite king, who ruled thousands of years ago in these ancient lands called Anatolia, where we could not fit in and got into a mad fight, to his sons: When I die, wash me properly, lay me on your chest and leave me in the ground. That’s it.”…

70

The Delights of Learning Turkish
A self-study course book for learners of Turkish

Yasar Esendal Kuzucu

‘The Delights of Learning Turkish’ is a self-study course book that takes the learner from the beginner level to the intermediate level in Turkish. It is designed for English speakers, targeting adult and young adult learners; especially for those planning to settle and live in Turkey or visiting Turkey for business or pleasure. It is a comprehensive, explanatory approach to Turkish language teaching how to construct and use the language both in formal and colloquial forms with dialogues, examples, grammar points, vocabulary and exercises. It shows the grammatical structures in detail with…

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71

Cin Ali Series (10 Books)

Selcuk Seymen Rasim Kaygusuz

72

Dare to Disappoint
Growing Up in Turkey

Ozge Samanci

Growing up on the Aegean Coast, Ozge loved the sea and imagined a life of adventure while her parents and society demanded predictability. Her dad expected Ozge, like her sister, to become an engineer. She tried to hear her own voice over his and the religious and militaristic tensions of Turkey and the conflicts between secularism and fundamentalism. Could she be a scuba diver like Jacques Cousteau? A stage actress? Would it be possible to please everyone including herself?
In her unpredictable and funny graphic memoir, Ozge recounts her story using inventive collages, weaving together…

73

I’ve Weared Shackles Out of Longing

Ahmed Arif

Out of Longing, I Abandoned Shackles, was first published in 1968. It has been reprinted many times since then. It was in the hands, words and songs of several successive generations of socialists and revolutionaries. It has had an unforgettable, special place in the bittersweet memories of many.
In our opinion, Ahmed Arif’s poems symbolize the love of the country and the people, the spirit of rebellion and the ethics of rebellion, both of the poet’s own generation and of the 68-78 generations after him. With this 40th anniversary special edition of the book, we wanted to give a red carnation to older generations with Ahmed Arif’s lines. More importantly, from the eyes…

74

secret agency

Alper Caniguz

Musa, a young and wandering copywriter who believes that the world is a conspiracy against him… His clean-hearted roommate Şaban, who approaches every aspect of life with a deep and sincere curiosity… On the other hand, an advertising agency with strange employees, managed by a vicious cat. : Violet-eyed art director Sanem, brunette and sexy secretaries Mehtap and Sevilay, creative director Cesme, who cries incessantly, psychic-seismographer Ercan… And celebrities: Tesla, Prince Charles, Kaan Cesyum, Little Prince, Superman and others… In his original style, his first book Wide range from Sweet Dreams…

75

Other Colors
Essays and A Story

Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely

Orhan Pamuk’s first book since winning the Nobel Prize, Other Colors is a dazzling collection of essays on his life, his city, his work, and the example of other writers.

Over the last three decades, Pamuk has written, in addition to his seven novels, scores of pieces—personal, critical, and meditative—the finest of which he has brilliantly woven together here. He opens a window on his private life, from his boyhood dislike of school to his daughter’s precocious melancholy, from his successful struggle to quit smoking to his anxiety at the prospect of testing against some…

76

Little Bird “Be Yourself!”

Rabia Gelgi

77

Living with Games

Oguz Atay

The black comedy of the Turkish literate, who has been trying to hold on to the ever-changing political and social values ​​since the Tanzimat. Atay made a gripping play out of the fear of being ridiculous and incompetence brought about by a past life with inaction.

78

Fly Grocery Store

Halide Edib Adivar

Sinekli Bakkal, Adıvar’s novel that has been published many times, read by millions of readers and never lost its currency, has a special place in Turkish novels. We present this work, which is one of the first books that comes to mind when we hear the word “novel”, accompanied by an afterword by Selim İleri.

Sinekli Bakkal, which has been published many times and has been able to reach from generation to generation, II. Reflecting the period of Abdülhamid in front of a past time decor, he emphasizes the values ​​of culture, art and customs that should be inherited from the old to the new. In a sense, the author and his work are the quest for historical continuity…

79

Tol

Murat Uyurkulak

“You’re thawed and you’re about to die of embarrassment. You think your name will only be cleared if half the world blows up. You’re already planning this all the time. You are lingering with futile revenge plans. And you can’t do anything else until you put a bullet in your head. Unless that divinity you bought last year in Kırıkkale doesn’t get stuck, of course.”

80

The Flea Palace

Elif Shafak

Set within a once-stately apartment block in Istanbul, The Flea Palace tells the story of Bonbon Palace, built by Russian noble émigré Pavel Antipov for his wife Agripina at the end of the Tsarist reign. It is now sadly dilapidated, flea-infested, and home to ten very different individuals and their families. Elif Shafak gives us a bird’s-eye insight into each apartment, and we see their comic and tragic lives unfold.

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81

Forty Rooms with Three Mirrors

Murathan Mungan

One day I will draw a curtain from what I wrote in my life. Everyone will think that what is written on paper is my life, so I will be hiding my life. The best way to hide is to look too much, you know? Everyone thinks they see you, so you can relax. Like the girl sitting at the cash register! Everyone sees the girl at the cash register, but no one recognizes her.

82

Black Milk
On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within

Elif Shafak

An acclaimed Turkish novelist’s personal account of balancing a writer’s life with a mother’s life.

After the birth of her first child in 2006, writer Elif Shafek from postpartum depression that triggered a profound personal crisis. Infused with guilt, anxiety, and bewilderment about whether she could ever be a good mother, Shafak stopped writing and lost her faith in words altogether. In this elegantly written memoir, she retraces her journey from free-spirited, nomadic artist to dedicated but emotionally wrought mother. Identifying a constantly…

83

The Legend of Ararat

Yasar Kemal

The Legend of Mount Ararat, a love epic, is about the love between Ahmet and Gülbahar, who defended their traditions against Mahmut Han. This novel of Yaşar Kemal, who is deeply devoted to legends and folk legends, also includes the depths of human psychology.

“Yaşar Kemal started writing while he was dealing with the right literature of Anatolia. Because he is a real writer, he was able to be inspired by the sensitivity of the language and the culture of the Turkish people, the only hero of the poetic epic.”
Jeliha Hafsia, La Presse, (Tunisia)

“Yaşar Kemal’s novel has the caliber of Tolstoy and the vitality of Dickens…

84

Rental Mansion

Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu

Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, in his first novel, Rental Mansion, depicts the differences in thought, emotion and worldview that have occurred between generations with the Westernization of our society, based on the concept of social dissolution, around the dispersal of a mansion. Some of the people of the mansion, which was put up for sale, who were thrown to different places with this change, in the process of breaking from the Tanzimat to the Constitutional Monarchy, ceased to be people who wore Istanbulin, were restrained and chaste, and with their redcoats on their backs – in the words of the novelist-, of a “hypocritical, half-servant and vulgar” generation. become their representative.

85

The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

Orhan Pamuk, Nazim Dikbas

What happens within us when we read a novel? And how does a novel create its unique effects, so distinct from those of a painting, a movie, or a poem? In this inspired, thoughtful, deeply personal book, Orhan Pamuk takes us into the worlds of the writer and the reader, revealing their intimate connections.

Cotton draws on Friedrich Schiller’s famous distinction between “naive” poets–who write spontaneously, serenely, unselfconsciously–and “sentimental” poets: those who are reflective, emotional, questioning, and alive to the artifice of the written word. Harking back to the…

86

hababam class

Rifat Ilgaz

7 May 1911, Rfat Ilgaz’s birthday. My father will be 100 years old on May 7, 2011. His readers call him “Big Cinar”. It is not easy to be alive for exactly 100 years…

Rıfat Ilgaz always emphasized that individuals living in an uneducated society would want to achieve their goals by using violence and pressure. He believed that societies giving importance to art, culture and education could be contemporary. For him, the artist was the guide of society. That’s why, in his own words, he had his “eyes on the society, his ears on the people”.

He was more than a father to me, he was a wise man. Even today, this aspect is scarce…

87

 

88

Spirit Man

Huseyin Nihal Atsiz

“Soul Man” is an unusual novel in Turkish literature. Those who have read the author’s historical novels will see that this work, which started as a historical novel, is not so, and as the pages progress, they will find themselves in an extreme symbolism. The novel, which also includes a historical flavor, is the life of an officer who finds the purpose of his life only in the military. When looked carefully, it will be seen that a life story told through supernatural events is nothing but the expression of the facts framed by symbols.

“Soul Man” is a person struggling with his own self…

89

A Peace to End All Peace
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and The Creation of the Modern Middle East

David Fromkin

The critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling account of how the modern Middle East came into being after World War I, and why it is in upheaval today

In our time the Middle East has proven a battleground of rival religions, ideologies, nationalisms, and dynasties. All of these conflicts, including the hostilities between Arabs and Israelis that have flared yet again, come down, in a sense, to the extent to which the Middle East will continue to live with its political inheritance: the arrangements, units, and divisions imposed upon the region by the Allies after the…

90

Birds Without Wings

Louis de Bernieres

In his first novel since Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières creates a world, populates it with characters as real as our best friends, and launches it into the maelstrom of twentieth-century history. The setting is a small village in southwestern Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Everyone there speaks Turkish, though they write it in Greek letters. it’s a place that has room for a professional blasphemer; where a brokenhearted aga finds solace in the arms of a Circassian courtesan who isn’t Circassian at all; where a beautiful Christian girl named Philothei…

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91

Istanbul Souvenir

Ahmet Umit

If the city you live in is not free, you cannot be free either!..

An exciting, historical adventure stretching from Byzantion to Istanbul…

Seven rulers, seven ancient places, seven mysterious events and a simple truth!

Known for his mastery of presenting the rich background in detective fiction in his novels, this novel of Ahmet Ümit is also fictionalized around murders committed one after the other. However, there are many features that distinguish this book from an ordinary detective novel. First of all, Istanbul Hatırası with its rich staff brings together Istanbulites from various segments…

92

Mill

Sabahattin Ali

“Here, my namesake, is the story of a loving Gypsy for you.

In the season when the flowers bloom, it’s nice to sit by the far waters and kiss, kiss until you get tired, with a body that rests on your arms and smells as good as flowers…

It is nice to walk around in front of the door of a proud beauty who turns her head cruelly when she sees you, under the moonlight, and to tell this to your sincere friends by crying – we say – again.

But to be able to tear off something that is not found in a beloved body, by not tolerating to carry it, here is my namesake, only this is to love.”…

93

Amo, Amas, Amat and More

Eugene H. Ehrlich, William F. Buckley Jr.

A witty and entertaining guide to the use of Latin expressions for one’s own advantage in the modern world.

94

Is There No Donkey in Your Country?

Dear Nesin

Is There No Donkey in Your Country? It has a different place among Aziz Nesin’s books. A summary of the half-century-long writing life of the world-famous humorist. The stories, poems and memories in this book were chosen by Aziz Nesin himself before his death. In a sense, Aziz Nesin’s selections from Aziz Nesin… Perhaps one of Aziz Nesin’s most difficult and most meaningful books. Because for a writer, everything he writes is valuable and meaningful. Aziz Nesin, however, overcomes this challenge, with his usual mastery.

95

Shadowless ones

Hasan Ali Toptas

“Maybe he was thinking right; everyone had a poor in the village, there was a flock of people like everyone else, they were going in and out of the houses like people, they were sitting in the cafe and drinking tea, working in the fields, gathering under the shade of the plane tree, and they were crying at death and playing at weddings. The headman was unaware of these, he had not met any of them. Maybe the villagers were hiding their flock with great care, everyone was quietly feeding their own. Maybe each person had a unique method in this regard; for example, some were feeding dreams all night long, while others were drinking lullabies, some with folk songs and tales…

96

Kitab-ul Hyel

Ihsan Oktay Anar

Ihsan Oktay Anar’s second novel, Kitab-ül Hiyal, which surprised and delights many readers with his Misty Atlas of Continents, tells the “incredible life stories of ancient inventors”. From Yafes Çelebi, Calud and Lalezar Necef Bey to Angilidis Efendi, from Samur and Yağmur Çelebis to Uzun İhsan Efendi, many inventors, humorists, narrators, “suggesters”, victims, drunks, taverns, coffee shops… Kitab-ül Hyel is one of the novels that one cannot tell but one would want to share with someone.

97

Leyla’s House

Zulfu Livaneli

Sometimes a war changes the fate of a city or a country, sometimes a single person of a whole family… Leyla: A pashazade who was born in the seaside residences, an Ottoman nobleman… Ali Yekta: An Istanbulite who is burning with the desire to change his fate as a servant… Rukiye-Roxy: Germany A hip-hop artist who was born in Turkey and worked as a sex model. Livaneli combines the lives of these three different personalities, who have never known each other, in an “Istanbul novel”. Citizen-peasant, rich-poor, religious teacher, banker, journalist… Each one of them for some reason entered the other’s life, changed it, today…

98

Legend of the Binbulls

Yasar Kemal

The novel of the Turkmens, who resisted to settle for centuries, begins with the wishes of the nomads to find shelter for the winter, during the Hıdrellez festivals. However, winter will turn into a story of extinction for them.
A lament for the extinction of the nomads.

“Yaşar Kemal described how a culture is lost in a shocking way with The Legend of the Binboğalar.”
Allan Sandström, Wasterbottes Kurriren, (Sweden)

“What Yaşar Kemal writes is about the collapse of this universe, the market economy that started in the nineteenth century and suddenly in the twentieth century…

99

Am I Small? Je Suis Petite, Moi ?

Philipp Winterberg

Bilingual edition English-French: “Am I small?” – Tamia is not sure and keeps asking various animals that she meets on her journey. Eventually she finds the surprising answer… Je suis petite, moi ? Perplexe, Tamia se met en route a travers un monde fabuleux et colore pour aller poser sa question. Emerveillee, elle y croise des collectionneurs d’arcs-en-ciel et des attrape-c urs avant de finir par trouver une reponse etonnante…

On Fertile LandOrhan Kemal

“This book, apart from my own knowledge and manners, has come into being with material compiled from people who have lived a life like a poison in bad working conditions for a bite of bread. Before it was published, I gathered various capstans, masters and assistant masters and read them all night long. They listened. ‘Sorry,’ they said, ‘that’s it. All you said is true. Even missing. In the fertile lands of Çukurova, such things happen that you lose your mind. If we told you, you would produce not one but five novels…”

Orhan Kemal’s books are among those rare treasures that a reader can come across in life.

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