The Renovation - by Kenan Orhan (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE*

*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION*

A New York Times Book Review Book Club Pick

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.

Review Quotes

"A bold, ambitious debut novel with an instantly intriguing conceit . . . I couldn't stop thinking about it."
--MJ Franklin, The New York Times Book Review

"In his first novel, Orhan weaves a psychologically fine-tuned tale that's just surreal enough to capture the vertigo of immigration."
--Vulture (Best Books of February)

"Kafkaesque . . . The Renovation delves further into the themes of emigration, amnesia and incarceration . . . An intriguingly allegorical work . . . Fascinating."
--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Orhan produces a haunting meditation on memory and displacement that reconsiders the meaning of liberation."
--The New Yorker

"An eerie, evocative allegory."
--Hamilton Cain, Time

"A strange and spellbinding tale, heartrending yet humorous . . . Orhan's novel is deeply rooted in Turkey's recent unraveling, from the 2013 Gezi Park protests to the failed 2016 coup and the series of purges in its wake. As religious nationalism surges and freedoms are snuffed out, the narrator and her father--a dissident political scientist--are forced into exile. The dread that consumes the narrator's family is palpable."
--Chloe Hadavas, Foreign Policy

"Truly original, this debut novel grips from start to finish."
--Elle

"Addictive and chilling, yet so sensitive, so beautifully told--like Kafka by way of Pedro Almodóvar. I couldn't put this book down and I didn't want it to end. Kenan Orhan is a truly gifted writer, drawing us down into a tunnel of memory and madness."
--Avni Doshi, author of Burnt Sugar

"Elegant, propulsive, and wholly original, The Renovation is a profound meditation on familial duties, memory, displacement, and the devastating longing for a home that exists solely in the past. It will stay with me for a long time."
--Cecile Pin, author of Wandering Souls

"The Renovation brilliantly describes what it's like for 'elsewhere' to be 'here.' An instant entry not just into the canon of migrant literature but into the literature of now."
--Isabel Waidner, author of Sterling Karat Gold

"Written with a slyly comic touch, The Renovation has at its heart an unexpected and powerfully charged emotional space. There are encounters between Dilara and her aging, exiled father that will stay with me for a long time to come."
--Chetna Maroo, author of Western Lane

"[A] claustrophobic, captivating allegory about family, country, and the failure of memory . . . There's a lot of emotional power between the drama and the premise here--what seems merely impossible is quickly overwhelmed by the tale's connecting thread, this inability to recover what has been lost. It's an odd, elegant little book with disarming sincerity that belies its metaphysical hocus pocus, held aloft by keen literary wordplay and an evocative exploration of what homeland really means."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Tender [and] astonishing."
--Raúl Niño, Booklist

About the Author