Introduction
Turkey has many myths and legends, especially regarding natural phenomena or historic structures that have a story about their origins. From stories of daughters and fathers to princesses and brave suitors, check out some of the most interesting legends from across the country. We hope you can find new favorites in this listing of Turkish books and enjoy them thoroughly.
1. Stepmother Earth – Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu
One of the Turkish books for fanatics of history and literary fiction. Ahmet Celal, an officer in the Ottoman military, loses his proper arm as the end result of a bullet wound while preventing the Battle of Gallipoli during World War I. After the war, he returns to Istanbul, which is now occupied by Allied forces made out of British, French, and Italian troops. He moves right into a mansion in Istanbul which he inherited from his father. Although he’s well-educated and at domestic in the culturally wealthy city, he feels alienated and lonely, as he’s cruelly taunted and teased in Istanbul society due to his disability, and he desires of shifting to the countryside.
When one in every one of his lieutenants gives to allow him to stay with him and his family in a village in central Anatolia, he jumps on the chance. However, as soon as he takes up house in the village, which seems to be ways extra impoverished and primitive than even he’d imagined, he’s once again treated like an outcast—not due to his lacking arm, but due to the fact he’s a “stranger.” When the Greek military invades Anatolia, he’s horrified to locate that the villagers are absolutely detached from the concept of resisting and setting up a Turkish state. In the meantime, he falls in love with a village woman who also spurns him due to the fact he’s an outsider. A wonderful one among Turkish books.
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2. Dear Shameless Death – Latife Tekin
‘Tekin commenced writing Dear Shameless Death, in 1980, some days after the army coup d’état. She was twenty-3 and desired it to be a razzle-dazzle novel, a book complete of sound and shimmering light, whichever manner you looked at it.’ She succeeded. It is expansive, complete with rural superstitions, myths, fairy stories, and idiosyncratic characters. The first part, set in a small Anatolian village is specifically fantastic, populated with djinns, a fair-haired and malevolent witch, and ‘donkey boy’, all of whom the kid protagonist, Dirmit, believes in implicitly. Based on Tekin’s own childhood experiences, it’s miles a fascinating mixture of brilliant imaginings fused with the common info of village life…Dear Shameless Death is an impressive, innovative novel. It is also a present to Tekin’s own circle of relatives and village neighbors: a remembrance in their lives.’ Edinburgh Review
This is the strange, magical story of a younger girl growing up in current Turkey, from her birth in a small rural village haunted by fairies and demons to her stressful move to the large city. A precise one of Turkish books. Concentrating on a daughter’s battle against her overbearing mom set against the pressures of a hastily changing society, Dear Shameless Death is a fantastic, hallucinatory novel, with robust feminist insights about what it method to be a girl growing up in Turkey today.
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3. Human Landscapes from My Country – Nazim Hikmet
Written at some point during the Second World War even as Hikmet became serving a 13-yr sentence as a political prisoner, his verse-novel makes use of cinematic strategies to inform the tale of the emergence of secular, modern Turkey by focusing on the always-interesting memories of sundry characters from all walks of life. A precise is one of the Turkish books.
The first books of the poem follow parallel rail trips heading into Anatolia from Istanbul’s Haydarpaşa Station in 1941, the trains turning into symbolic microcosms of Turkey’s “human landscape.” Book 3 is ready in a jail in the center of the Anatolian steppe, even as books 4 and 5 are extra experimental, casting the internet out even further and reducing among scenes throughout time and space. As his vignettes flash earlier than our eyes at movie-like speed, it will become clear he is also telling the turbulent story of the 20th century itself and the ongoing war between tradition, which trusts in God, and modernity, which entrusts the sector to human hands. One of the Turkish books that everybody must read.
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4. Portrait of a Turkish Family – Irfan Orga
An autobiography that going from 1913 to 1940, the book lines the family and social lifestyles of a top-class family that with the Great War and the autumn of the Ottoman Empire misplaced the financial and social privileges of its function till it changed into reduced to a kingdom of excessive poverty, and as much as its tiring ascent towards an acceptable standard of living.
Describes in chilling, but affectionate, element the disintegration of a rich Ottoman family, each financially and emotionally. It is wealthy with the heady fragrance of fin de siecle Istanbul in the final days of the Ottoman Empire. His mom changed into a beauty, married at thirteen, as befitted a Turkish girl of her elegance. His grandmother changed into an eccentric autocrat and decided in any respect prices to preserve her conventional habits. But the battle modified everything.
Death and monetary disaster reigned, the Sultan was overthrown, and Turkey have become a republic. The red fez was ousted through the fabric cap, and the family changed into forced to conform to an unimaginably impoverished lifestyle. Filled with exceptional vignettes of antique Turkish lifestyles, such as the ritual of weekly go to the Hamam, because it tells the “different side” of the Gallipoli story and its effect on one family and the transformation of a nation. One of the fine Turkish books out there.
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5. The Sultan of Byzantium – Selcuk Altun
“The novel, translated from Turkish by Clifford and Selahn Endres, is punctuated through the literate wit of the author, whose great variety of references extends from historical authors to trendy crime fiction. This is a highly exciting crash-direction in imperial bloodbaths, plus a travelogue, interwoven with snippets of poetry.”
Fighting the Ottoman invaders in Constantinople in 1453, Emperor Constantine XI became killed, his frame in no way found. Legend has it that he escaped in a Genoese ship, cheating certain death at the hands of the Turks and earning himself the name of Immortal Emperor. Five centuries after his disappearance, 3 mysterious men contact a younger professor living in Istanbul.
Members of a mystery sect, have got guarded the Immortal Emperor’s will for generations. They inform him that he is the next Byzantine emperor and that in an effort to take ownership of his fortune he should perform his ancestor’s closing wishes. The professor embarks on a risky journey, taking him to the heart of a thriller of epic ancient significance. The Sultan of Byzantium is a symbiosis of tales and records and a homage to Byzantine civilization.
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6. Summer’s End – Adalet Agaoglu
Narrated by a writer on a vacation to most of the classical ruins of the historic town of Side on the Mediterranean coast in Turkey, Summer’s End presents an intricate image of a huge cross-phase of current Turkish society. The novel gives a complex multi-dimensional and multi-leveled view of cultural values, politics, sexuality, and private dilemmas. Summer’s End is one of the most celebrated works through Adalet Agaoglu, widely considered to be one of the essential novelists of our time.
Summer’s End, says critic Sibel Erol in her introduction, “is an elegiac novel of tried reconciliation and comfort set in a lush and delectable putting that intensifies the heartbreaking contrast among existence and death and society’s fragmentation and nature’s natural unity.” Adalet Agaoglu is the author of 8 novels as well as plays, memoirs, 4 collections of brief stories, and 6 collections of essays. Her books had been extensively translated. Summer’s End is the second one to seem in English. She lives in Istanbul.
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7. A Useless Man: Selected Stories – Sait Faik Abasiyanik
A Useless Man: Selected Stories by Sait Faik Abasiyanik, translated by Maureen Freely, and Alexander Daw. Almost 60 years after the author’s death, the short stories of Turkish literary treasure Sait Faik Abasiyanik (who posted as Sait Faik) were beautifully translated into natural, ordinary English in A Useless Man: Selected Stories.
In this sampler of 37 portions from his 12 volumes of brief works, Sait Faik trustingly confides his very private memories to the reader in small, intimate constructions which can span a whole lifetime or seize a fleeting moment. His minimalist verbal delights–stream-of-attention monologues, elegiac prose-poems, love confessions, depression reflections–are evocative and sentimental without ever being saccharine. A guy who by no means leaves the 4 streets of his community and hasn’t bathed in seven years takes a fearful ride to the metropolis in “A Useless Man.” In “I Just Don’t Know Why I Keep Doing These Things,” an old hunchback loses his amber prayer beads in a coffeehouse and is satisfied the narrator has stolen them.
A guy whom strangers always ask for help is approached by a newly hired illiterate guy to read aloud lab outcomes in “Four Pluses.” A mentally compromised carpenter tries to give an explanation to a judge why he should not visit jail, but then starts to change his thoughts in “His Uncle’s Coat.” And “In the Rain” has a drunk who follows and confides in a lovely woman, begging her not to turn round and see how wretched he is.
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8. The Girl in the Tree The Girl in the Tree – Shebnem Isiguzel
From an award-winning Turkish novelist comes an effective English-language debut about a girl coming of age amid violent unrest — and her sudden escape.
A celebrated modern-day is considered one of the Turkish books. A younger female climbs the tallest tree in Istanbul’s centuries-antique Gülhane Park and decided to stay out the relaxation of her days there. Perched in a deserted stork’s nest in a sanctuary of branches and leaves, she attempts to make experience the growing tide of violence in the global below. Torn between the choice to neglect all that has occurred and they want to remember her story, and the stories of those around her begin to unfold.
A lonely boy operating at a close-by lodge seems up and falls in love. The proportion tales of the fates in their families, of a converting city, and in their political awakenings in the Gezi Park protests. Together, they navigate their histories of affection and loss, set towards a backdrop of societal anxiety main as much as the tragic bombing that marked a flip in Turkey’s democracy—and sent a younger girl fleeing into the trees.
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9. Snapping Point – Asli Bicen
One of the Turkish books set in the Aegean. ‘But for that slender reference to the mainland, Andalıç might be a normal island,’ says Aslı Biçen in the beginning chapter of this deliciously multi-layered novel. And it might be an ordinary story about love and loss, if it weren’t for the earthquake that unexpectedly units the landmass afloat at the Aegean, kindling a chain of increasingly oppressive measures by the authorities; ostensibly to hold public order.
The story follows Cemal, a shopkeeper handling the fallout from his absent father’s death. It also makes a specialty of Jülide, a scholar looking for her area in the world. Both of them are running their manner thru difficult relationships- Cemal with his fiancée Saliha who’s suffering from depression and Jülide has to get out of an abusive relationship. As they’re working thru these issues and the island detaches from the mainland, they each broaden a growing understanding that lifestyles on the island are extra corrupt than the idea and that they could have to take duty and motion to restore it.
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10. Two Green Otters – Buket Uzuner
Two Green Otters is a newly translated novel by bestselling Turkish writer Buket Uzuner. In this story of a younger woman’s struggle to find love and acceptance, Buket Uzuner explores the complexities of human relationships even offering an original reinterpretation of the position of each environmentalism and love in the world today. An environmentalist fiction amongst Turkish books.
When her mom abandons her family, Nilsu loses religion in the global and everyone in it. Terrified of struggling the equal fate, she breaks off relationships earlier than they even begin. Teo’s near relationship with his mom has always held him returned and whilst she commits suicide, his lifestyle slips off the rails. In this story of a younger woman’s battle to locate love and acceptance, Buket Uzuner explores the complexities of human relationships. With her special touch, she weaves a poignant and magical love tale of souls in the current global. Two Green Otters gives up an authentic reinterpretation of the position of environmentalism and love in the globe today.
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Conclusion
It took us a long time to create this listing of Turkish books because we desired to ensure there was a book for everyone’s taste. You’ll find fantastically written experimental books as well as hilarious mysteries. There are current Turkish books as well as the much-loved classics and current classics. We hope you may find new favorites in this listing of Turkish books and enjoy them thoroughly.
