The Renovation

A New York Times Book Review Book Club Pick

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, she becomes 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, she confronts the prison’s other inhabitants―the buffoonish guards who refuse to believe her conundrum; the other women who begin filling the cells beyond hers―and the strange things that drift through it: the smell of the Bosporus, her mother’s voice, calls to prayer …

This slender, disquieting first novel tells a story of modern migration like no other. The Renovation is a tragic comedy of displacement, a story that remodels its own form to the dazzling inevitable end.