Talks & Entertainment

From the Nobel Prize winner and bestselling author of Snow and My Name Is Red comes A Strangeness in My Mind, a panoramic new novel telling the unforgettable tale of an Istanbul street vendor and the love of his life.

Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karataş has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he’d hoped, at the age of twelve he comes to Istanbul and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built.

Hoping to become rich he follows his father’s trade, selling a traditional Turkish drink on the street. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut’s side. As he watches his peers settle down and make their fortunes, he spends three years writing love letters to a girl he saw just once at a wedding, only to elope by mistake with her sister. And though he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have, he stumbles toward middle age in a series of jobs leading nowhere.

Every evening, without fail, Mevlut wanders the streets of Istanbul, wondering at the “strangeness” in his mind, the sensation that makes him feel different from everyone else, until fortune conspires once more to let him understand at last what it is he has always yearned for. In conversation with Elliot Ackerman, the author of the bestselling novel Green on Blue and the forthcoming novel Dark at the Crossing, set in southern-Turkey. Book signing to follow.