Published By: Hamish Hamilton
Pages: 240
Released On: 26/03/2026
Dilara’s father is disappearing. His memories are collapsing, dementia stealing a little more of him each day. She has persuaded him to move in with her, hiring builders to adapt her apartment to his new needs, but when the renovation is complete she discovers a big problem: instead of a new en-suite bathroom, the builders have installed a Turkish prison cell.
At first she is outraged. There has surely been some mistake. Dilara’s family are exiles – they left Turkey many years ago and have never been back. The last thing she wants is a piece of her estranged homeland appearing uninvited in her new home.
But as the weeks pass, her indignation gradually gives way to curiosity. Beyond the cell door, she glimpses Turkish guards going about their work. Through the cell walls, she hears Turkish prisoners murmuring, rustling, crying out in their sleep. And in the strange, impossible air of the cell itself, she smells the sesame scent of freshly baked simit, she tastes the fine dust of the Anatolian steppe on her tongue.
Even as she struggles to care for her father, to keep the family finances afloat and stop the wheels coming off her marriage, Dilara is drawn back again and again to the mysterious prison cell, and through it to a city that once belonged to her – to the salt wind off the Marmara, the sky full of gulls and domes and minarets – drawn inexorably back to Istanbul.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Hamish Hamilton for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
This sounded very intriguing and I really wanted to read it.
It is a very bizarre premise, the idea of your newly renovated bathroom actually being a prison cell in another country. I wonder where Kenan got his idea from. But it is deeper than just a mistaken bathroom development.
The analogies are clear but not overused. The main female, Dilara, her husband her father are exiles, and the idea of being stuck and imprisoned in an unfamiliar environment is clear. Their worlds are shrinking, both their physical world and their own lives, shutting down, hiding in themselves, and they almost put themselves in their own personal cell, as it where. It also become a sort of escape for Dilara, somewhere she can be enclosed and have other people responsible for her for a change.
My nan died of Dementia in 2016 and it was a full-on year before that where she gradually and then rapidly deteriorated. And it’s difficult to explain to other people who haven’t experienced it just how dementia seeps into every aspect of a life – of that person and their family. But Kenan has done it very well here. He doesn’t sensationalise it, but instead handles it with honesty and respect.
There aren’t chapters as such, just a few parts. I love a short, snappy chapter, so I’m usually a grump when it comes to long books or ones split into parts. And I’m on the fence here. It is a relatively short book and so even having long sections didn’t feel too long. Having said that, I’d have liked those parts to be split slightly into chapters because you read 20% of the book before you get a breather a the end of the part. But that’s solely a personal opinion.
I can see this being very popular with the award boards. Which would normally mean I didn’t like it, because I find books on prize lists a bit too literary and serious for my liking. And this does have that element but it’s also a very powerful and enjoyable story with interesting characters.
I don’t think I’ve read anything like this before, and yet there was something niggling at me that it reminded me of something. And it took a while but it reminded me of I Who Have Never Known Men. It’s nothing like the plot or characters, but it just had a similar tone. And even though I wasn’t a big fan of IWHNKM, I was a fan of this, it’s original, it’s weird, it’s heartfelt, it’s quick to read, and just really enjoyable.
Books By Your Bedside 