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A woman discovers that her bathroom has been remodeled into a prison cell―where she is an unlikely inmate―in this surreal novel of exile, grief, memory, and migration.
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 unfortunate 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 ...
Has she gone mad? Is she the victim of a terrible prank? Is it a portal, a dream, a simulation? As she burrows deeper into her cell, her life beyond it begins to fall apart―her husband disappears, her father's grip on reality loosens, political dictatorship threatens to destroy everything worth keeping.
In his slender, disquieting first novel, Kenan Orhan tells a story of modern migration like no other. The Renovation is a tragic comedy of displacement, a story that remodels its own form to the dazzling inevitable end.
"It's an odd, elegant little book with disarming sincerity that belies its metaphysical hocus pocus, held aloft by keen literary wordplay and an evocative exploration of what homeland really means." —Kirkus Reviews
"Tender [and] astonishing." ―Booklist
"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." ―Cecile Pin, author of Wandering Souls
"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." ―Isabel Waidner, author of Sterling Karat Gold
This information about The Renovation was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kenan Orhan'sdebut collection, I Am My Country: And Other Stories, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and was long-listed for the Story Prize. His fiction appears in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Common, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. The Renovation is his first novel.
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