The Renovation

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Dilara is renovating her apartment. The contractors take weeks to complete the project, while Dilara dreams of a waterfall shower with massaging jets. But when the renovation is done, she discovers a problem: where the bathroom should be, the workmen have instead built a Turkish prison cell.

This is a problem for several reasons. One, Dilara left Turkey under a dark cloud seven years ago and prefers not to think about it. Two, Dilara has her hands full with a dying father and a neurotic husband and has no time for absurdist pranks. And three, now Dilara has no bathroom.

To make matters worse, she quickly realises that this prison cell is no fake. It is a real prison cell in the middle of a prison in the middle of Istanbul. It is an impossible portal from Italy to Turkey. It is a mystery that she wants no part of. And she can't stop thinking about it.

From this brilliantly playful and unexpected opening unfolds a poignant, wise and richly layered novel about family, homesickness and grief, about a shining city on the sea, about the politics of contemporary Europe and the rising tide of history which creeps up around ordinary people, threatening to wash them away.

I love this book — it’s a book club host’s dream. I was electrified by the conceit… I felt like I was falling through a series of trap doors. I call these ‘Trojan horse books’: zany top level, really deep interior, with a bunch of surprises
New York Times Book Review (MJ Franklin on The Book Club Podcast)

About Kenan Orhan

Kenan Orhan is a writer based in Kansas. His first story collection, I Am My Country, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize in 2024. His first novel, The Renovation, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2026. His fiction appears in the Atlantic, Paris Review, Common and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories.

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Details

Imprint: Penguin
Published: 18/03/2027
ISBN: 9781405976091
Length: 240 pages
Price: £9.99

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The Renovation

Format:

Pre-order:

I love this book — it’s a book club host’s dream. I was electrified by the conceit… I felt like I was falling through a series of trap doors. I call these ‘Trojan horse books’: zany top level, really deep interior, with a bunch of surprises

Lyrical, Kafka-esque... The premise is inventive, the symbolism astute, the prose clean and neat and frequently beautiful... Leaving your homeland, we discover, is a series of constant losses

A superb first novel, impressive on every level... At once an urgent allegory about what it is to live in exile, it’s equally a powerful, visceral and heartbreakingly uncompromising portrait of dementia

I mean, I loved this book. The first name that comes to mind for me is Kafka… I did not see [the ending] coming, but after I read it and put the book down, I realized that was the only way it could end

A haunting meditation on memory and displacement that reconsiders the meaning of liberation

Addictive and chilling, yet so sensitive, so beautifully told – like Kafka by way of Pedro Almodóvar – I couldn’t put it down and I didn’t want it to end. Kenan Orhan is a truly gifted writer, drawing us down into a tunnel of memory and madness

Truly original, this debut novel grips from start to finish

A surreal novel of migration and memory [which] follows Orhan’s celebrated 2023 story collection

Surreal, mysterious, engrossing... A domestic drama shaped by the political turbulence of the Erdogan era

Elegant, propulsive and wholly original, The Renovation is a profound meditation on familial duties, memory, displacement and the devastating longing for a home that exists solely in the past. It will stay with me for a long time

About Kenan Orhan

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