Every Fire You Tend

Synopsis

This novel by one of Turkey's most highly regarded writers tells the story of a granddaughter's reckoning with the suppressed and traumatic memories of her grandmother, who survived a genocidal massacre in the Dersim region of southeast Turkey in 1938. Based on Sema Kaygusuz's relationship to her own grandmother, the novel embeds the turmoil of contemporary mass violence within mythic and deep historical timescapes, cracking open the modern history of Turkey to ask greater questions about good and evil, about exile and survival, about resilience in an age of everyday horror.