Endgame: A Novel - Softcover

Altan, Ahmet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609453778 ISBN 13: 9781609453770

Publisher: Europa Editions, 2017

Synopsis

Named one of Washington Post’s 50 Notable Books of 2017

Despite widespread political censorship and crackdowns by the Erdoğan regime, Ahmet Altan bravely crafts a novel about the ways in which corruption envelops contemporary Turkish life. Endgame is an atmospheric and enigmatic literary noir, in which an unnamed writer visits a small town and finds himself involved in a mystery with existentialist implications.

A womanizing writer who has lived his entire life in the city retires to a sunbaked Turkish village. Instead of the quiet life he hoped for, he encounters a world of suspicion, paranoia, and violence. The town's mayor is both his only real ally and his greatest nemesis; his lover shares an ambiguous past with the mayor; the town seems 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.

The protagonist of this bestselling existential page-turner is an appealingly untrustworthy narrator whose story transports the reader into a world of lust, ambition, small-town politics, and death. A detective story turned on its head, Endgame is compellingly infused with a dreamlike logic reminiscent of Paul Auster and Graham Greene.

About this title

From the Back Cover

“The time has come to tell you what happened.”

From the opening pages of Ahmet Altan’s remarkable novel, you are drawn by its enigmatic narrator into a murder mystery that will have you guessing until its final pages. Superbly translated by Alexander Dawe, this detective story turned on its head is provocative, funny, playful and wise—a book that is as erotic as it is gripping.

Already published to great acclaim in Altan’s native Turkey, Endgame introduces a major international writer to readers in the English-speaking world. Reminiscent of the fiction of Calvino, Fitzgerald and Fowles, this is a novel of startling originality that tackles serious ideas with a delightful lightness of touch. And it is a reading experience that you are unlikely to ever forget.

About the Author

Ahmet Altan, one of today’s most important Turkish writers, was arrested in September 2016 for his work as a journalist. An advocate for Kurdish and Armenian minorities and a central figure in the Turkish cultural world (Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk has written about his arrest and signed a open letter calling for his release), he is the author of five successful novels. The first, published when he was twenty-seven years old, won the Grand Prix from the Akademi Publishing House. In 2009 he received the prestigious Freedom and Future of the Media Prize from the Media Foundation of Sparkasse Leipzig and in 2011 he received the International Hrant Dink Award. The international bestseller Endgame is his English-language debut.

About this edition

• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1609453778
• ISBN 13: 9781609453770
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320