Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective-novel-loving Rèuya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband, Celãal, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celãal, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celãal's identity, wearing his clothes, answe...more
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...more
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 deliv...more
Orhan Kemal is one of Turkey's best-loved writers, with a standing equal to Charles Dickens in England. These are the first two semi-autobiographical novels in a series, set in the 1920s and 1930s when Turkey was undergoing major social change. The unnamed narrator grows up in an affluent household in an Adana village with his brother, two sisters,...more