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Ateş

Ateş

Contemporary RomanceDrama
Pages
472
Published
2023
Language
Turkish

Synopsis

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.

Prose complexity
4/10

Vibe

MysteriousThought-ProvokingTense
Quest

Genres

Contemporary Romance Drama Mythology Adventure Contemporary Literature Mystery

About the author

B
Buket Uzuner

Buket Uzuner is a Turkish novelist, short-story writer and travel writer, born in Ankara in 1955. She trained as a biologist and worked in environmental science, lecturing in Turkey, Norway, the United States and Finland before writing full time. Her novels include Two Green Otters (1991), The Sound of Fishsteps (1993), Mediterranean Waltz (1997), The Long White Cloud – Gallipoli (2001) and Istanbullu (2007), together with the Adventures of Misfit Daphne Shaman sequence, which opened with Water...

Characters

Defne KamanProtagonist

A journalist who disappears in Mardin after being threatened over her work teaching refugee children.

Umay NinesiSupporting

A grandmother figure who leads the search for Defne in Mardin.

All characters in Ateş