The Disenchanted

With a twisting, captivating play on perception, this novel presents a frame story about how it came to be written. Containing two main narrative strands set five years apart, the story within is about Kuzey, a former left-wing militant and now a hotel owner, who is writing a novel called The Disenchanted. Kuzey’s romance with a young woman is juxtaposed with his descent into alcoholism and despair. The book is set against the backdrop of a beautiful peninsula in Western Turkey where a landscape charged with memories lives outside time, but as neither the landscape nor Kuzey can forget, there is no real escape from the peninsula—and appearances can be deceiving.

Mehmet Eroglu is a writer and teacher. His first novel, Issizligin Ortasinda, won the Milliyet Novel Contest in 1979. He has also worked on screenplays, one of which was awarded Best Film at the 1996 Istanbul Film Festival.