The Renovation

By (author) Orhan, Kenan
Description:

*One of the Guardians top 10 debuts to watch out for in 2026*

A dazzlingly original new voice in literary fiction for fans of Ali Smith, Mohsin Hamid and Elif Shafak

The Renovation is a heart-breaking portrait of one family caught in the tides of history, grappling with grief, exile, politics and the painful absurdity of love

Dilara’s father is disappearing.

He has dementia and the disease steals a little more of him each day. Dilara has persuaded him to move in with her, hiring builders to adapt her apartment in preparation, but when the renovation is complete she discovers a big problem. Instead of a new bathroom, the builders have installed a Turkish prison cell.

At first she is outraged. There has surely been some mistake. Dilara’s family are exiles – they left Turkey many years ago and have never been back. The last thing she wants is a piece of her estranged homeland appearing uninvited in her new home.

But as the weeks pass, her indignation gives way to curiosity. Beyond the cell door, she glimpses Turkish guards going about their work. Through the cell walls, she hears Turkish prisoners murmuring, rustling, crying out in their sleep. And in the strange, impossible air of the cell itself, she smells the sesame scent of freshly baked simit, she tastes the fine dust of the Anatolian steppe on her tongue.

Even as she struggles to care for her father, to keep the family finances afloat and stop the wheels coming off her marriage, Dilara is drawn back again and again to the mysterious prison cell, and through it to a city that once belonged to her – to the salt wind off the Marmara, the sky full of gulls and domes and minarets – back to Istanbul.

Review quote:
I love this book — it’s a book club host’s dream. I was electrified by the conceit… I felt like I was falling through a series of trap doors. I call these ‘Trojan horse books’: zany top level, really deep interior, with a bunch of surprises
Review quote:
I mean, I loved this book. The first name that comes to mind for me is Kafka… I did not see [the ending] coming, but after I read it and put the book down, I realized that was the only way it could end
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A superb first novel, impressive on every level... At once an urgent allegory about what it is to live in exile, it’s equally a powerful, visceral and heartbreakingly uncompromising portrait of dementia
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A haunting meditation on memory and displacement that reconsiders the meaning of liberation
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Addictive and chilling, yet so sensitive, so beautifully told – like Kafka by way of Pedro Almodóvar – I couldn’t put it down and I didn’t want it to end. Kenan Orhan is a truly gifted writer, drawing us down into a tunnel of memory and madness
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Truly original, this debut novel grips from start to finish
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A surreal novel of migration and memory [which] follows Orhan’s celebrated 2023 story collection
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Surreal, mysterious, engrossing... A domestic drama shaped by the political turbulence of the Erdogan era
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Elegant, propulsive and wholly original, The Renovation is a profound meditation on familial duties, memory, displacement and the devastating longing for a home that exists solely in the past. It will stay with me for a long time
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The Renovation brilliantly describes what it’s like for “elsewhere” to be “here”. An instant entry not just into the canon of migrant literature but into the literature of now
Biographical note:
Kenan Orhan is a writer based in Kansas.