Ateş

Ateş (Fire) closes Buket Uzuner's Nature Elements tetralogy (following Su, Toprak, and Hava). Journalist Defne Kaman disappears in Mardin alongside a child during an unexplained fire, and her grandmother-figure Umay Ninesi travels there with friends to find her.

The search reveals that Defne had been threatened for teaching displaced refugee children, drawing in Doctors Without Borders, Journalists Without Borders, and the people of Mardin itself. As the search unfolds, the region's layered Mesopotamian myths keep resurfacing, tying the searchers to millennia of people who have lived in and passed through this land.

Written with climate change and displacement as its backdrop, Uzuner builds a modern Anatolian mythology around the "earth-respecting" figures of older tradition.