In a crumbling mansion in a gentrified former fishing village on the Turkish coast, the widow Fatma awaits the annual visit of her grandchildren Faruk, a dissipated historian his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgün and Metin, a high schooler drawn to the fast life of the nouveaux riche. Bedridden, Fatma is attended by her faithful servant Recep, a dwarf—and her late husbands illegitimate son. Mistress and servant share memories, and grievances, from the past. But the arrival of Receps cousin, Hasan, a fervent right-wing nationalist, threatens to draw the family into the political cataclysm arising from Turkeys tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity. Written in the 1980s but never before published in English, this spellbinding novel is a stunning addition to the works of Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk.
