Seven books by writers from Turkey, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Memed, My Hawk and Istanbul: Memories and the City.
Turkey's best-known writer is Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. Literature in Turkey reaches back to oral epics such as the Book of Dede Korkut and the poems of the Sufi mystic Yunus Emre, while Ottoman court poetry borrowed heavily from Persian models. In 1928 the young Republic replaced the Arabic script with a Latin alphabet for writing Turkish.
Pamuk's Snow is set in the snowbound border city of Kars, where headscarf bans, political Islam and military coups collide. Yashar Kemal's Memed, My Hawk is an epic of a village boy turned bandit who defies a feudal landlord in the Taurus mountains. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's The Time Regulation Institute mocks bureaucracy and Westernising reforms in the early Republic. Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul binds a Turkish and an Armenian-American family together through the legacy of the 1915 genocide.
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Epic tale of a village boy turned bandit defying a feudal landlord in the Taurus mountains and Çukurova plain of southern Anatolia.
Pamuk's memoir weaves his family's decline with the melancholy (hüzün) of Istanbul's ruined Ottoman grandeur and Bosphorus neighbourhoods in the 1950s–60s.
A poet visits the snowbound eastern border city of Kars, where headscarf bans, political Islam, military coups and Kurdish tensions collide.
Two families, one Turkish and one Armenian-American, are bound together by the legacy of the 1915 genocide and Istanbul's household life.
An obsessive love story set among upper-class Istanbul society from the 1970s to the 1980s, rich in everyday objects and social codes.
Satirical novel of Turkey's early Republican modernisation, mocking bureaucracy and Westernising reforms from the late Ottoman era onwards.
A poignant love story told through a young clerk in 1930s Ankara, revealing the stifling conformity of the early Republic.
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