Dilara is a Turkish exile, living in Italy with her husband and her ailing father, a blacklisted political academic who is gradually succumbing to dementia. Having fled President Erdoğan’s oppressive regime, the three of them have led a comfortably uneventful life for some years. When Dilara hires some builders for a renovation, she is astonished to discover that in place of the expected swish new bathroom, they have installed a Turkish prison cell, a sesame-scented portal to their much missed homeland. A wonderful exploration of memory, captivity and exile. The Renovation by Kenan Orhan is yet another gem on this year’s excellent Booker Longlist.
Unable to transfer her child psychology qualifications to Italy, Dilara has become a homemaker, ostensibly still job seeking but taking on increasingly onerous caring duties for her father, who is forgetting words ‘…as if the grain of sand on which this information was written had fallen out of his ear’.
Deciding to install a second bathroom for his exclusive use and comfort, events take a bizarre turn when the builders vacate the premises, leaving Dilara to discover that the bathroom is, in fact, a cell; as confirmed by a guard passing by the bars, who tells her that she’s in the notorious Silivri mega-prison in Istanbul. Unwilling to get any grief from the warden, he tells her to keep this odd situation to herself.
When the utterly discombobulated Dilara returns the next morning, a small blue arabesque cup brimming with coffee appears in the corner of the cell. One sip and Dilara is lost in visions of a once favourite café, as the ‘enormous distances of time and space’ between herself and Istanbul collapses.
Orhan’s surreal story is excellent on recent Turkish history, the decline of Dilara’s father reflected against a backdrop of related past events: coups, protests, indefinite detentions and trials, ‘…this was Turkey ever and always, an elected dictatorship, a Caesarean Rome’.
Under increasing strain caring for her father, Dilara begins retreating to the prison cell for breathing space, (her father, in turn, retreating to the increasingly barren cell of his own mind). The air in Dilara’s prison is reminiscent of the dusts and odours that sweep in on the winds from the Black Sea. Sometimes this feeling is so incredibly intense that she believes she can almost see the hills of Istanbul, its ancient domes and minarets.
Meanwhile, through steel cell bars, Dilara can see increased prison activity. Silivri is expanding; ghosts of the past are hovering while the portal boundaries dissolve. As she dwells in and on her Turkish life, Orhan considers how exile and memory are inextricably linked.
‘Have you become immune to your motherland? Its wounds against you don’t bruise or scab over or scar- they itch and ache like a phantom limb’.
Perceptive and original, with a powerful denouement, it’s remarkable to think that this is Orhan’s debut novel. An impressive addition to the Booker 2026 longlist.
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan is published by Hamish Hamilton, 256 pages.
