Zülfü Livaneli, born Ömer Zülfü Livanelioğlu in 1946, is a Turkish novelist, composer, film director and politician, and one of the country's best-known cultural figures. His novels include The Eunuch of Constantinople (1996), Bliss (2002), Last Island (2008) and Serenade for Nadia. Bliss received the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers award in 2006; he has also won the Balkan Literary Award for best novel (1997), the Yunus Nadi Award (2001) and the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize (2009). He sat...
Leyla'nın Evi
Leyla'nın Evi
Synopsis
Leyla'nın Evi (Leyla's House) follows an elderly, penniless Leyla, the last heir to a Bosphorus yalı (waterside mansion) that has just been taken from her through fraud by its new owners, Ömer Cevheroğlu and his wife Necla. Leyla is the child of a forbidden love between an Ottoman pasha's daughter and a British officer stationed in occupied Istanbul.
Displaced, Leyla becomes a guest in the Cihangir home of Yusuf, a young journalist and the son of the mansion's former gardener, who has known her since childhood. There she meets Roxy — born Rukiye, the daughter of Turkish migrant workers in Germany who fled her family and built a new identity and income as a model abroad.
Zülfü Livaneli braids these three unrelated lives together to trace Turkey's social transformation from the last Ottoman decades through the Republic to the present, using the fight over one house as the hinge for a much larger story about displacement and belonging.
Vibe
Genres
Characters
LeylaProtagonist
An elderly woman, born of a forbidden love between an Ottoman pasha's daughter and a British officer, who loses her family's mansion to fraud.
Roxy (Rukiye)Protagonist
A Turkish-German migrant worker's daughter who fled her family and reinvented herself abroad.
YusufProtagonist
A young journalist, son of the mansion's former gardener, who takes Leyla in.
Places
Edition
No cover available
Leyla'nın EviPaperback
272 pages
Remzi Kitabevi
