Resmigeçit is a political novel about a country’s recent history full of shame and sorrow. It is a novel to be read while the cauldron of history continues to bubble in this quite familiar country.

In the novel, the secret, forbidden history of a country is told by the elderly servant of a summer kiosk built for Atatürk in just forty days over the sea in Istanbul. The servant was a child found in a sack of potatoes brought to the kitchen, an Armenian child who witnessed what happened in Anatolia in 1915.

Everybody ends up in this summer kiosk at one point or another: power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats, generals conspiring to carry out coups, and poor people cooling off on the shores of the sea. It is an imposing parade of a century-long history full of filth and dirty laundry, the history of a country that, try as it might, can never quite manage to achieve democracy.