Cold Nights of Childhood - by Tezer Özlü (Paperback)

About the Book

"The narrator of the novel is between lovers. She is in and out of psychiatric wards, where she is forced to undergo electroshock treatments. She is between Berlin and Paris. She returns to Istanbul, in search of freedom, happiness, and new love. Set across the rambling orchards of a childhood in the Turkish provinces and the smoke-filled cafes of European capitals, Cold Nights of Childhood offers a sensual, unflinching portrayal of a woman's sexual encounters and psychological struggle, staging a clash between unbridled feminine desire and repressive, patriarchal society"--

Book Synopsis

WINNER OF THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE TRANSLATION PRIZE

"A profoundly moving account of desperation, exhilaration, and endurance."--Kirkus Reviews

The Bell JarGood Morning, Midnight, by one of Turkey's most beloved writers.

The narrator of Tezer Özlü's novel is between lovers. She is in and out of psychiatric wards, where she is forced to undergo electroshock treatments. She is between Berlin and Paris. She returns to Istanbul, in search of freedom, happiness, and new love.

Set across the rambling orchards of a childhood in the Turkish provinces and the smoke-filled cafes of European capitals, Cold Nights of Childhood offers a sensual, unflinching portrayal of a woman's sexual encounters and psychological struggle, staging a clash between unbridled feminine desire and repressive, patriarchal society.Originally published in 1980, six years before her death at 43, Cold Nights of Childhood cemented Tezer Özlü's status as one of Turkey's most beloved writers. A classic that deserves to stand alongside The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Cold Nights of Childhood is a powerfully vivid, disorienting, and bittersweet novel about the determined embrace of life in all its complexity and confusion, translated into English here for the first time by Maureen Freely, with an introduction by Aysegül Savas.

Review Quotes

"In Özlü's posthumous English-language debut, a young woman describes her 1950s childhood and her treatment for mental illness in her 20s. 'All I ever wanted was to be free to think and act beyond the tedious limits set by the petit bourgeoisie, ' says the narrator... The edition includes a magnificent introduction from Ayşegül Savaş, who puts Özlü (1943-1986) in a lineage with Italo Svevo and Franz Kafka and praises her frank approach to sexuality as 'neither sensational nor metaphorical.'"--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"A profoundly moving account of desperation, exhilaration, and endurance."--Kirkus Reviews

"It's uncanny how clearly Özlü speaks of a different time yet, simultaneously, of this moment."--The Financial Times

"Cold Nights of Childhood...is the most distilled articulation of Özlü's heart."--Kaya Genç, The Los Angeles Review of Books

"For fans of Tove Ditlevsen's Copenhagen Trilogy, Özlü's book is an intense yet sparsely written coming-of-age novel following a young girl become a young woman through psych wards, shock treatments, and explorative sexual encounters. At once salacious and deeply, honestly felt, Cold Nights of Childhood forces its reader to look at the world as it does: dark, difficult, and sensual." Kyle Williams, McNally Jackson Books (NYC)"Özlü's semi-autobiographical novel often finds itself in the moment before the sunrise. Sometimes reveling in the dark by the sea, sometimes under the harsh fluorescent falsehood of involuntary institutionalization. Existing in those moments before the day breaks, this novel moves in ways I've never felt a book move before. Between lovers and electroshock sessions, through countries, in tight sentences that whorl, like Charybdis, into something compelling and dangerous."--Bee, Pegasus Books (Berkeley, CA)

About the Author

Tezer Özlü was born in 1943 in Turkey and lived in Paris, Ankara, Istanbul, Berlin, and Zurich where she died in 1986. Cold Nights of Childhood is her first novel to be translated into English.
Maureen Freely is a writer, translator and Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies and a member of English PEN. She is the author of six novels, three works of non-fiction and is the translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.