Memoir — The Book Roads

Journey to the Edge of Life

Tezer Özlü

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.

Türkiye Germany 2025