The Renovation

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) *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 * New York Times Book Review (Dave Kim on The Book Club Podcast) *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 * Daily Mail *A haunting meditation on memory and displacement that reconsiders the meaning of liberation * New Yorker *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 – Avni Doshi, author of ‘Burnt Sugar’Truly original, this debut novel grips from start to finish * Elle *A surreal novel of migration and memory [which] follows Orhan’s celebrated 2023 story collection * Guardian *Surreal, mysterious, engrossing… A domestic drama shaped by the political turbulence of the Erdogan era * Mail on Sunday *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 – Cecile Pin, author of ‘Wandering Souls’The Renovation brilliantly describes what it’s like for “elsewhere” to be “here”. An instant entry not just into the canon of migrant literature but into the literature of now – Isabel Waidner, author of ‘Sterling Karat Gold’

Kenan Orhan is a writer based in Kansas. His 2023 short story collection, I Am My Country, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and was longlisted for the Story Prize. 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. The Renovation is his first novel.

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