Firat Sunel’s 2015 Turkish novel is now available in English translation. The central figure, Eylül, a narrator-heroine, is consumed by an inability to differentiate between her dreams, hallucinations, and waking reality. Her internal turmoil becomes increasingly apparent as she confronts the traumatic circumstances surrounding her mother’s drowning a painful confrontation that ultimately forces her to face uncomfortable truths about her own identity. To delve further would risk revealing a critical plot twist best left for new readers to discover.

What remains enigmatic, however, is the novel’s deeper exploration of blurred boundaries between imagination and reality, as experienced through the lens of Eylül, a young law graduate in her twenties. Educated in Germany, she returns to Istanbul in the early 2010s to take over the responsibility for her late mother’s law practice. Her psychological distress is portrayed not as a purely personal crisis, but as one with broader implications.

Although the narrative could be interpreted as a gripping psychological thriller in the style of Hitchcock, a melodramatic soap opera, a romantic saga, or even a suspenseful mystery, its ambition stretches far beyond genre constraints. The novel’s extensive length over 600 pages in its translated form its wide-ranging cast of characters and shifting settings, along with frequent allusions to significant political and historical events in 20th-century Turkey, collectively suggest a deliberate effort to intertwine the personal with the political, the individual psyche with the national consciousness.

In this intricate interplay, Eylül’s growing desperation and her failure to align her inner world with external reality get emerges not merely as a symptom of personal psychological distress, but as a metaphor for a larger social dilemma. The novel subtly critiques how many privileged young individuals, like Eylül, may be exacerbating their own emotional alienation by distancing themselves from the collective historical memory of their nation. In doing so, the story raises profound questions about identity, belonging, and the psychological cost of disconnection from one’s cultural and historical roots.