Books from Türkiye

What happens when an ordinary letter makes you question everything you thought you knew? In the title story of Waiting for the Fear, an isolated man receives a mysterious message written in a language he cannot understand. As he struggles to decipher its meaning, suspicion gradually takes over his life, transforming his home into a place of dread and his everyday existence into an increasingly surreal nightmare. Across eight stories, Oğuz Atay introduces a cast of outsiders, misfits, and troubled souls struggling to connect with a society that seems determined to misunderstand them. A woman confronts unsettling memories after discovering her former lover’s body; lonely storytellers sell invented tales to passengers at a remote railway station; other characters find themselves trapped between their private fantasies and an indifferent world. Blending dark humour, psychological unease, absurdity, and experimental storytelling, Waiting for the Fear explores the fragile boundary between reality and imagination. Atay’s characters are haunted not only by external threats but also by their own thoughts, revealing the loneliness of people who can no longer trust the world—or themselves.

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.