“If while on an unknown route you think that you have lost your way, do not waste time with maps and compasses, but retrace your steps. Going to a place you know, along roads that you know, will make you feel at peace. Do the same thing whenever you feel that you have lost your way in life, and retrace your steps, going back as far as you can, to your childhood, among us, for example…”

 

In this book, Şebnem İşigüzel has invented this epigraph, supposedly the words of her grandfather. While that is the extent of Abidin İşigüzel’s role in this collection of short stories, written by his granddaughter when she was a mere twenty-one years old and still “young and ignorant of the world,” he would later attain his dream of “becoming the hero of a novel” years later, again thanks to the pen of his granddaughter.

 

In this second book of hers, Abidin’s granddaughter once more tells us unforgettable stories. Dark, evil, fragile, passionate, and obsessed. About those things concealed behind the visible. Secret truths. The things that nobody dares to tell.