Get audio access with any FP subscription.

Subscribe Now

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

This month, as immigration dominates the news cycle in the Americas, we’re sitting down with two groundbreaking yet unsettling novels about displacement, assimilation, and exile.

Kenan Orhan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pp., $27 February 2026)

This month, as immigration dominates the news cycle in the Americas, we’re sitting down with two groundbreaking yet unsettling novels about displacement, assimilation, and exile.

Kenan Orhan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pp., $27 February 2026)

If the premise of Kenan Orhan’s debut novel is decidedly Kafkaesque—“I don’t know by what accident the builders had managed it, but instead of a remodeled bathroom attached to my bedroom, they had installed a prison cell,” it opens—the detail underlying it is chillingly real. The renovated en suite leads to Silivri (now called Marmara), the mega-jail that has become a symbol of Turkey’s authoritarian turn under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

This dance between the real and surreal underpins The Renovation, which follows the narrator, who has settled into an Italian village after fleeing Erdoğan’s crackdown, as she cares for her ailing father and clings to fading memories of her life in Istanbul. It’s a strange and spellbinding tale, heartrending yet humorous, and buoyed by the narrator’s almost nonchalant approach to the botched remodeling. (“After trying in vain to get answers from the builders … I figured I might as well accept life’s peculiar gift to me,” she thinks early on.)

Orhan’s novel is deeply rooted in Turkey’s recent unraveling, from the 2013 Gezi Park protests to the failed 2016 coup and the series of purges in its wake. As religious nationalism surges and freedoms are snuffed out, the narrator and her father—a dissident political scientist—are forced into exile. The dread that consumes the narrator’s family is........

© Foreign Policy