Turkish Fiction ~ Billington Library @ JCCC

An Annotated Bibliography of Works by Turkish Authors And Some Novels by Authors outside Turkey that Examine Turkish Life and History

	Farhi, Moris	PR 6056 .A65 Y68
	Young Turk	London: Saqi, 2004
	This is a mosaic of thirteen bittersweet short stories about life in Istanbul in the period surrounding World War II. These interlinking stories describe the lives of adolescent Jews and their neighbors as Turkey struggled and failed to fulfill the promise of becoming a tolerant multicultural society.

	Livaneli, O.Z.	PL248.L58 M8813 2006
	Bliss	New York: St. Martins, 2006
	A fifteen-year-old rape victim refuses to hang herself. A cousin is ordered to take her to Istanbul and see that she dies along the way; however, he also cannot kill her and together they find sanctuary as the crew on a large sailboat owned by a wealthy professor fleeing a privileged life.

	Pamuk, Orhan	PL 248 .P34 W4713
	The Black Book	New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994
	A jealous husband searches for his missing wife. The husband assumes the identity of her half-brother, a famous and also missing journalist in this novel of stolen identity.

	Pamuk, Orhan	PL 248 .P34 B4613
	My Name is Red	New York: Knopf, 2001
	This is a challenging and exciting narrative about the time when the Ottoman Empire began its decline. It tells the story of the search for the murderer of a manuscript illustrator. Along the way the novel discusses the nature of art, the place of art in Islam, fundamentalism and also manages to be a love story.

	Pamuk, Orhan	PL 248 .P34 Y9313
	A New Life	New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997
	A university student reads a book that completely changes his perspective on life causing him to embark on an odyssey of aimless bus rides throughout the back roads of Turkey. He seems to be seeking the angel of death and what he discovers is a bizarre conspiracy to keep the book from readers and another conspiracy to countermand the first. Like much of the author's fiction the book is a meditation on the influence of the west on Turkish culture.

	Pamuk, Orhan	PL248.P34 K36513
	Snow	New York: Knopf, 2004
	A poet who has lived abroad for many years returns to Turkey and investigates the suicides of several young women who have been expelled from the secular state university for insisting upon wearing their head scarves.

	Pamuk, Orhan	PL 248 .P34 W4713
	The White Castle	New York: Braziller, 1991
	This novel of seventeenth century Turkey tells the story of an educated Italian who is captured by the Turks and becomes a slave of a scholar. The two become so close that in the end it becomes a question of who is whom.

	Shafak, Elif	PS3619.H328 B37 2007
	The Bastard of Istanbul	New York: Viking, 2007
	The American daughter of an Armenian mother and Turkish step-father goes to Istanbul to visit her large eccentric Turkish family comprised of only women. She is looking for answers about the Armenian genocide and hoping to connect with her relatives. The author was charged, but not convicted of insulting "Turkishness" when the novel was published.

	Shafik, Elif	PL 248 .S474 M3413
	The Gaze	New York: Marion Boyars, 2006
	A dwarf and a grotesquely obese woman live together, only going out together in disguise in order to avoid the stares of people on the street. He is writing a dictionary of "Gazes” which examines how people look at each other and at themselves. The novel examines how we become what we see reflected in others eyes.

	Shafak, Elif	PS 3619 .H328 S25
	The Saint of Incipient Insanities	New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004
	This novel follows the downward spiral of three foreign graduate students living in Boston. Filled with bittersweet humor, the men struggle to make sense of their world and the women to whom they are attracted. At times they are aloof from the temptations, at others they dive into all the allures of their new home, usually with disastrous results.

	Tekin, Latife	PL 248 .T35 B4713
	Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills	London: Marion Boyars, 1996
	In this autobiographical novel, a group of homeless families from the Turkish provinces build a shanty town on top of a garbage dump and try to make a life for themselves despite the rain of chemical pollution and government hostility they encounter. The novel is full of folk tales and wisdom and reflects the fatalistic attitude of the squatters.

	Tekin Latife	PL 248 .T35 S4813
	Dear Shameless Death	New York: Marion Boyars, 2001
	This novel chronicles the life of a young girl growing up in modern Turkey from her birth is a village to her traumatic move to Istanbul. Replete with episodes of magic realism and imbued with a feminist sensibility as the protagonist struggles with her overbearing mother, the novel was a best-seller in Turkey.

	Yasar, Kemal	PL 248 .Y275 I513
	Memed My Hawk	New York: Pantheon books, 1961
	A Turkish peasant is forced to become a bandit when unjustly accused by the large landowner in the district.

	Yasar, Kemal	PL 248 .Y275 A5
	Anatolian Tales	New York: Dodd Mead, 1969
	This collection of short stories describes the harshness and cruelty of life in Turkish villages in the beginning of the twentieth century.

	Yasar, Kemal	PL 248 .Y275 I513
	They Burn the Thistles	New York: Morrow, 1973
	The sequel to Memed My Hawk, this novel continues the saga of Turkey's Robin Hood who with his allies fights the injustice of the landowners.


Fiction by Non-Turkish Authors about Turkish History
Note: All of these books discuss the Experiences of Greeks and Armenians During and after World War I in Turkey

	De Bernieres, Louis	PR 6054 .E132 B57
	Birds Without Wings	New York: Knopf, 2004
	This novel shows the destruction wrought by World War I on the ethnic harmony of a Turkish community when Greeks and Armenians are forced from their homes and slaughtered in the name of progress and nationalism.

	Edgardian, Carol	PS 3555 .D464 R57
	Rise the Euphrates	New York: Random House, 1994
	The burden of history alternately divides and unites three generations of Armenian women in the United States, from a grandmother who survived the Armenian genocide in Turkey to a modern American granddaughter.

	Eugenides, Jeffrey	PS 3555 .U4 M53
	Middlesex	New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002
	The grandchild of Greek immigrants, who fled the massacre of Greeks in Turkey in the 1920's, has been raised female, only to discover when he hits puberty that he is actually male. This novel also chronicles the history of Detroit from the 20's to the 80's, from labor strikes to race riots and is an affectionate portrait of the Greek American community.

	Marcom, Micheline Aharonian	PS 3563 .A63629 T47
	Three Apples Fell from Heaven	New York: Riverhead Books, 2001
	"The author drew on the life of her Armenian grandmother as well as official documents and oral histories to write this work of fiction, which in no way resembles a straightforward historical novel. Many voices combine in a disjointed surreal manner to tell the frightening and tragic experiences of the doomed Armenians as they move slowly toward their collective destinies." Taken from a review in Kliatt, 7/02.

	Werfel, Franz	PT 2647 .E77 F67 1976
	Forty Days of Musa Dagh	Mattituck, N.Y: Aeonian, 1976 [1934]
	In 1915, during World War I, Armenians in Turkey attempt to withstand not only mass deportation from their homes but also wholesale extermination. This novel is a fictionalization of the first ethnic genocide in the twentieth century.


A Series of Mystery Novels from Germany About the lives of Turkish Immigrants in Europe

	Arjouni, Jakob	PT2661.R45 H37
	Happy Birthday Turk	New York: Fromm International, 1993
	This is the first of a series of "noir" detective novels featuring a German detective of Turkish ancestry who in this volume is investigating the death of a Turkish man who may be linked to the drug trade.

	Arjouni, Jakob	PT 2661 .R45 M4413
	And Still Drink More	New York: Fromm International, 1994
	This is the second in a series of "noir" detective novels featuring a German detective of Turkish ancestry who in this volume gets mixed up in a "Green" bombing of a dirty chemical plant in which the plant's owner turns up murdered.

	Arjouni, Jakob	PT 2661 .R45 M3613
	One Death to Die	New York: Fromm International, 1997
	This is the third of a series of "noir" detective novels featuring a German detective of Turkish ancestry who in this volume is investigating the trade in illegal immigrants in Germany and the phony passport business.