Endgame: A Novel

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