The Renovation

by Kenan Orhan

When Dilara, an Istanbul exile living in Salerno, hires builders to adapt her flat for her ailing, dementia‑stricken father, the finished work is anything but ordinary. Instead of a sleek new bathroom, a concrete cell materialises—a replica of a Turkish prison, complete with guards, murmuring inmates and the scent of the Bosporus seeping through its walls. At first she fights the absurdity, demanding a correction, but the cell becomes a portal to a past she thought she had left behind. As the prison’s strange sounds and smells infiltrate her daily life, Dilara’s marriage frays, her father’s memories dissolve, and political unrest threatens to erase the few things she still holds dear. In this haunting, surreal novel, Kenan Orhan weaves exile, grief, and the uncanny into a meditation on how home, memory, and identity can be rebuilt—or imprisoned—by the very walls we construct.