Books from Türkiye

An unnamed Turkish writer embarks on a restless journey across Europe, following the lives and deaths of three writers who have profoundly shaped her imagination: Cesare Pavese, Franz Kafka, and Italo Svevo. Travelling through Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, and other cities, she seeks out the places where they lived, wrote, and died, hoping to understand the connection between literature, suffering, and the desire to live. But this is no ordinary literary pilgrimage. Moving between memories, encounters with lovers, and reflections on her own troubled past, the narrator questions marriage, sexuality, political repression, and the expectations society imposes on women. Her travels become an attempt to escape the confines of her former life and discover a freedom that has always seemed just beyond reach. Blurring the boundaries between autobiography, travel writing, and fiction, Journey to the Edge of Life is an intense meditation on loneliness, mortality, and the search for meaning. Tezer Özlü transforms the European landscape into a map of her inner world, revealing how the lives of writers we admire can become inseparable from our own search for identity and freedom.

Istanbul, 1906. The Ottoman Empire stands on the brink of transformation as political conspiracies and revolutionary movements threaten centuries of imperial rule. Behind the walls of Yıldız Palace, Sultan Abdülhamid II struggles to preserve his authority, while in Macedonia, a young Ottoman officer must choose between loyalty to the Sultan and his secret commitment to the Young Turk movement. Meanwhile, Prince Selahaddin and his family long for freedom within their gilded confinement. As revolution gathers momentum, personal loyalties collide with political ambition, and the fate of an empire becomes inseparable from the lives of those born to rule it. Drawing on family memories and historical research, Ayşe Osmanoğlu brings the twilight of the Ottoman dynasty to life through an intimate portrait of family, duty, and upheaval.

Dilara, a Turkish exile living in a small Italian town, is struggling to care for her father, whose memories are gradually disappearing as dementia takes hold. Preparing to welcome him into her home, she commissions a renovation to make the apartment more comfortable. But when the builders finish, she discovers that her new bathroom has been transformed into a Turkish prison cell, complete with guards and prisoners. What initially seems like an absurd mistake soon becomes a mysterious connection to the homeland Dilara left behind. Through the cell, she encounters echoes of Istanbul, her family’s painful past, and the political violence that forced them into exile. As her domestic life begins to unravel, the prison becomes an unexpected gateway to memories she can neither fully recover nor escape. Blending surrealism, dark humour, and political allegory, The Renovation explores exile, belonging, family, and the ways political oppression and personal grief can imprison us long after we have crossed borders.