Su

Pages: 320
Published: 2012
Language: Turkish

Su (Water) opens Buket Uzuner's Tabiat Dörtlemesi — the Nature Tetralogy — built around the four elements of the Anatolian shamanic (Kam) tradition.

Defne Kaman, a journalist and an activist for animal, environmental, women's and children's rights, disappears from a fishing boat in the Bosphorus. Her family and her friend, Inspector Rahmi, set out to find her, and the search draws them into the Kam inheritance that runs through her family and into the Marmara region's water, its myths and its damage.

The first of four novels, each set in a different region of Anatolia and each keyed to one element: Su (2012), Toprak (2015), Hava (2018), Ateş (2023).

Prose complexity: 7/10

Mysterious Reflective Atmospheric Thought-Provoking

Family Saga Mystery Box

Literary Fiction Mystery Magical Realism

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...