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Kenan Orhan’s debut collection, I Am My Country: And Other Stories, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and was longlisted for the Story Prize. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Common, The Massachusetts Review, and other publications, and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. The Renovation is his first novel. More about this author >
From the publisher:
In Salerno, Italy, Dilara spends her days caring for her aging father and her hypochondriac husband. Since leaving her native Istanbul, she’s been unable to find a job—adrift, she becomes increasingly fixated on domestic improvement, specifically on the renovation of a second bathroom. When the work is completed, she enters and finds herself not in a bathroom but in a prison cell, and a Turkish one at that.
As she tries and fails to conceal the discovery from her husband, she confronts the prison’s other inhabitants—the buffoonish guards who refuse to believe her conundrum; the other women who begin filling the cells beyond hers—and the strange things that drift through it: the smell of the Bosporus, her mother’s voice, calls to prayer….
