The worldwide English debut of the million-copy-bestselling Turkish author
Bestselling Turkish author Ahmet Altan released his new novel, Endgame, in 2013, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies within the first weeks of publication. His previous novel, The Longest Night, published nine years earlier, sold one million copies in Turkey alone. With this English-language publication of Endgame, HarperCollins joins with international publishers to bring this masterful novelist to English readers for the first time.
In this sweeping story, a novelist travels to a small town near the coast to write a murder mystery and instead, through a series of twists and turns, becomes a murderer himself. Over the course of one night, he reveals what drove him to murder, including a love affair, a dangerous friendship with the town’s mayor, and an unwitting involvement in the power struggle among the townsfolk who believe that treasure is buried in the nearby hills. As with all of Altan’s work, the story is rife with fear, courage, evil, virtue, loyalty, betrayal, pleasure, sins, sex, dreams and solitude, all drawing us back to the power of the written word and the complexity of human relationships.

Endgame

Altan, Ahmet

Literature & Fiction

HarperCollins, Publishers

Best Book of the Year – Bloomberg News A resilient Turkish writer’s inspiring account of his imprisonment that provides crucial insight into political censorship amidst the global rise of authoritarianism. The destiny I put down in my novel has become mine. I am now under arrest like the hero I created years ago. I await the decision that will determine my future, just as he awaited his. I am unaware of my destiny, which has perhaps already been decided, just as he was unaware of his. I suffer the pathetic torment of profound helplessness, just as he did. Like a cursed oracle, I foresaw my future years ago not knowing that it was my own. Confined in a cell four meters long, imprisoned on absurd, Kafkaesque charges, novelist Ahmet Altan is one of many writers persecuted by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s oppressive regime. In this extraordinary memoir, written from his prison cell, Altan reflects upon his sentence, on a life whittled down to a courtyard covered by bars, and on the hope and solace a writer’s mind can provide, even in the darkest places.

I Will Never See the World Again: The Memoir of an Imprisoned Writer

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Other Press

An unnamed author is consumed by a small-town conspiracy in this existential noir by the award-winning Turkish author of Like a Sword Wound. Named one of Washington Post’s 50 Notable Books of 2017 In Endgame, award-winning author and Turkish political dissident Ahmet Altan has crafted an enigmatic literary noir exploring the ways corruption has overtaken contemporary Turkish life. With a dreamlike logic reminiscent of Paul Auster and Graham Greene, it tells the story of an unnamed man who arrives in a small town only to find himself involved in a mystery with existential implications (The Washington Post). The protagonist, a womanizing writer who lived his entire life in the city, retires to a sunbaked Turkish village to enjoy the quiet. Instead, he encounters a world of suspicion, paranoia, and violence. The town’s mayor is both his only ally and his greatest nemesis; his lover shares an ambiguous past with the mayor; the locals seem hell-bent on turning him into a murderer; and, he is initiated into the town’s biggest secret only to discover this knowledge will become a weapon used against him. All the while, Altan’s appealingly untrustworthy narrator transports the reader into a world of lust, ambition, small-town politics, and death. “Endgame is a mystery adventure of such intimately written humanity that it transcends genre, time, and place. If Steinbeck had written The Godfather it might have read like this.”―DBC Pierre, Man Booker Prize–winning author of Vernon God Little

Endgame: A Novel

United States

Europa Editions

A “magical, marvellous” epic of an empire in collapse: Book one in the acclaimed Ottoman Quartet by the award-winning Turkish author and political dissident (La Stampa, Italy). Tracking the decline and fall of the Ottoman empire, Ahmet Altan’s Ottoman Quartet spans fifty years from the end of the nineteenth century to the post-WWI rise of Atatu¨rk as leader of the new Turkey. In Like a Sword Wound, a modern-day resident of Istanbul is visited by the ghosts of his ancestors, finally free to tell their stories “under the broad, dark wings of death.” Among the characters who come to life are an Ottoman army officer; the Sultan’s personal doctor; a scion of the royal house whose Western education brings him into conflict with his family’s legacy; and a beguiling Turkish aristocrat who, while fond of her emancipated life in Paris, finds herself drawn to a conservative Muslim spiritual leader. As their stories of intimate desire and personal betrayal unfold, the society that spawned them is transforming and the sublime empire disintegrating. Here is a Turkish saga reminiscent of War and Peace, written in lively, contemporary prose that traces not only the social currents of the time but also the erotic and emotional lives of its characters. “An engrossing novel of obsessive love and oppressive tyranny, a tale of collapse that dramatizes the fateful moments of an empire and its subjects.”―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Like a Sword Wound (The Ottoman Quartet, 1)

Literary

From the author of Like a Sword Wound Weaving together tortured love affairs, political intrigue, power struggles, and social upheavals, Love in the Days of Rebellion offers a powerful and vivid tableau of the crisis of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. The second installment in the Ottoman Quartet--the masterful saga of Turkish history by Ahmet Altan--follows the vast and vivid cast of characters introduced in the first volume of the series, Like A Sword Wound. The novel opens with the attempted suicide of Hikmet Bey, the son of the sultan's personal physician. The reason for his extreme gesture was to forget the extremely beautiful and proud Mehpare Han&#305;m, his wife and the cause of all his suffering. While Hikmet is recovering in a hospital in Thessaloniki, slowly regaining his strength and will to live, radical changes are afoot in the Ottoman capital. The power of the sultan is eroding, a rebellion is brewing, and violence erupts on the streets of Istanbul. It is the eve of one of the key events that will lead to the collapse of the Empire: the countercoup of 1909. With striking clarity and imaginative power, Altan evokes the traumas and upheavals of Ottoman history, showing how--over a hundred years later--the events and wounds of that time still resonate in the tensions and contradictions of today's Turkey.

Love in the Days of Rebellion (The Ottoman Quartet, 2)

WINNER OF THE 2021 PRIX FEMINA FOR BEST FOREIGN NOVEL 
The third volume of the internationally acclaimed Ottoman Quartet, written by Ahmet Altan while he was imprisoned by the Turkish regime 
This masterly constructed, sweeping novel centers on the story of Nizam’s tormented love affair with a Russian pianist, Anya, and is told against the backdrop of the Ottoman Empire’s tumultuous history in the years leading up to WWI. 
Underlying the novel’s tale of war and love and Altan’s absorbing exploration of the inner lives of a vast cast of characters, is a fierce criticism of masculinity and of its degeneration into violence against women, nationalism, and authoritarianism. 
Once again, Altan confirms to be an elegant, powerful, and courageous writer, who is not afraid to denounce an arrogant and undemocratic government that, today as a century ago, relies on bigotry, censorship, and intimidation to cling to power and control the lives of its people.

Dying is Easier than Loving (Ottoman Quartet)

Fazil's comfortable existence studying literature is upended by his family's sudden financial ruin, followed swiftly by the death of his father. Forced to sell his belongings and move to an old boardinghouse, he discovers a new side of the city, populated by immigrants, poets, sex workers, and busboys, all struggling to get by. On a tip from a fellow resident, Fazil finds work to support himself through university, as an extra on a TV show, where he meets two women who will change his life. Sila, a striking young student, shares his love of Virginia Woolf and uniquely understands his current predicament: once well-off, she too has lost everything, after the government unjustly seized her father's business. While they begin a tentative romance, Fazil is also drawn to the show's vivacious leading lady, Hayat, whose carefree, sensuous outlook differs so greatly from his own. Written from his prison cell, Ahmet Altan's latest novel offers a witty, insightful view of modern Turkey and th

Lady Life: A Novel

Dramas & Plays

Genre Fiction

Fazıl, le jeune narrateur de ce livre, part faire des études de lettres loin de chez lui. Devenu boursier après le décès de son père, il loue une chambre dans une modeste pension, un lieu fané où se côtoient des êtres inoubliables à la gravité poétique, qui tentent de passer entre les mailles du filet d'une ville habitée de présences menaçantes. 
Au quotidien, Fazıl gagne sa vie en tant que figurant dans une émission de télévision, et c'est en ces lieux de fictions qu'il remarque une femme voluptueuse, vif-argent, qui pourrait être sa mère. Parenthèse exaltante, Fazıl tombe éperdument amoureux de cette Madame Hayat qui l'entraîne comme au-delà de lui-même. Quelques jours plus tard, il fait la connaissance de la jeune Sıla. Double bonheur, double initiation, double regard sur la magie d'une vie. 
L'analyse tout en finesse du sentiment amoureux trouve en ce livre de singuliers échos. Le personnage de Madame Hayat, solaire, et celui de Fazıl, plus littéraire, plus engagé, convoquent les subtiles métaphores d'une aspiration à la liberté absolue dans un pays qui se referme autour d'eux sans jamais les atteindre. 
Pour celui qui se souvient que ce livre a été écrit en prison, l'émotion est profonde.\nPrix Femina Étranger 2021\nFrom the Back Cover\nFazıl, le jeune narrateur de ce livre, part faire des études de lettres loin de chez lui. Devenu boursier après le décès de son père, il loue une chambre dans une modeste pension, un lieu fané où se côtoient des êtres inoubliables à la gravité poétique, qui tentent de passer entre les mailles du filet d'une ville habitée de présences menaçantes. 
Au quotidien, Fazıl gagne sa vie en tant que figurant dans une émission de télévision, et c'est en ces lieux de fictions qu'il remarque une femme voluptueuse, vif-argent, qui pourrait être sa mère. Parenthèse exaltante, Fazıl tombe éperdument amoureux de cette Madame Hayat qui l'entraîne comme au-delà de lui-même. Quelques jours plus tard, il fait la connaissance de la jeune Sıla. Double bonheur, double initiation, double regard sur la magie d'une vie. 
L'analyse tout en finesse du sentiment amoureux trouve en ce livre de singuliers échos. Le personnage de Madame Hayat, solaire, et celui de Fazıl, plus littéraire, plus engagé, convoquent les subtiles métaphores d'une aspiration à la liberté absolue dans un pays qui se referme autour d'eux sans jamais les atteindre. 
Pour celui qui se souvient que ce livre a été écrit en prison, l'émotion est profonde.\nPrix Femina Étranger 2021

Madame Hayat

Contemporary

Actes-sud

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Altan, Ahmet. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Altan, Ahmet

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Altan, Ahmet. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Endgame

I Will Never See the World Again: The Memoir of an Imprisoned Writer

Endgame: A Novel

Like a Sword Wound (The Ottoman Quartet, 1)

Love in the Days of Rebellion (The Ottoman Quartet, 2)

Dying is Easier than Loving (Ottoman Quartet)

Lady Life: A Novel

Love in the Days of Rebellion (The Ottoman Quartet, 2)

Madame Hayat

Madame Hayat