The Renovation
by Kenan Orhan
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Sign in*A woman discovers that her bathroom has been remodeled into a prison cell—where she is an unlikely inmate—in this surreal novel of exile, grief, memory, and migration.* In Salerno, Italy, Dilara spends her days caring for her aging father and her hypochondriac husband. Since leaving her native Istanbul, she’s been unable to find a job—adrift, she becomes increasingly fixated on domestic improvement, specifically on the renovation of a second bathroom. When the work is completed, she enters and finds herself not in a bathroom but in a prison cell, and a Turkish one at that. As she tries and fails to conceal the discovery from her husband, she confronts the prison’s other inhabitants—the buffoonish guards who refuse to believe her conundrum; the other women who begin filling the cells beyond hers—and the strange things that drift through it: the smell of the Bosporus, her mother’s voice, calls to prayer . . . This slender, disquieting first novel tells a story of modern migration like no other. *The Renovation* is a tragic comedy of displacement, a story that remodels its own form to the dazzling inevitable end.
Prize history
- Booker Prize 2026 Longlist
- National Book Award for Fiction 2026 Longlist
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