Zamir

Zamir is six days old when a bomb tears through the El-Aman refugee camp on the Turkish-Syrian border, killing his parents and destroying his face. A Norwegian surgeon, Asbjörn, saves his life in a marathon operation, and an international aid organisation adopts the boy. His face, which can no longer show any expression, becomes the symbol of its donation campaigns, and the child grows up on stages and in front of cameras, raising millions for war-wounded babies while learning that charity is an industry like any other.

As an adult, Zamir joins a peace foundation headquartered in Geneva and becomes its negotiator. He travels wherever armed conflict threatens, meeting politicians, dictators and militants, and he will use bribery, blackmail and lies if that is what it takes to keep a war from starting.

The novel is set on the eve of the new millennium, in a world that looks a great deal like our own, only sharpened: populist governments turning on minorities and migrants, Germany passing a law to send its Turkish residents away, and a whole sector that lives off other people's suffering. Hakan Günday's narrator keeps returning to one question: how do human beings make peace with each other?

Zamir was Günday's first novel in eight years, following More (Daha, 2013), and was published in Turkish by Doğan Kitap in 2021. A German translation by Sabine Adatepe followed from btb.