The Renovation
by Kenan Orhan
About The Renovation
A woman discovers that her bathroom has been remodeled into a prison cell, where she is an unlikely inmate, in this surreal novel of exile, grief, memory, and migration. In Salerno, Italy, Dilara spends her days caring for her aging father and her hypochondriac husband. Since leaving her native Istanbul, she's been unable to find a job, adrift, and increasingly fixated on domestic improvement, specifically on the renovation of a second bathroom. When the work is completed, she enters and finds herself not in a bathroom but in a prison cell, and a Turkish one at that. As she tries and fails to conceal the discovery from her husband, her life beyond the cell begins to fall apart, in a tragic comedy of displacement that remodels its own form toward a dazzling, inevitable end.