Güneşi Uyandıralım

Awakening the Sun (Güneşi Uyandıralım) picks up José Mauro de Vasconcelos's Zezé some years after My Sweet Orange Tree, as the boy — now older, poorer, and still fiercely imaginative — navigates a family in crisis and a string of adults who alternately fail and surprise him.

Vasconcelos keeps the same unsentimental, emotionally direct register as the first book, following Zezé through further loss and further tenderness as he inches toward adolescence. Where My Sweet Orange Tree ended in devastating loss, this sequel is about what a child does with grief once the story goes on — how he keeps finding reasons, and people, worth caring about.

The second installment of the loosely autobiographical Zezé cycle, it bridges the childhood of the first novel and the more turbulent coming-of-age of Delifişek.