What is the weight of a memory?
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 unfortunate 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 the smell of the Bosporus, her mother’s voice, calls to prayer . . .
Has she gone mad? Is she the victim of a terrible prank? Is it a portal, a dream, a simulation? As she burrows deeper into her cell, her life beyond it begins to fall apart—her husband disappears, her father’s grip on reality loosens, political dictatorship threatens to destroy everything worth keeping.
In his slender, disquieting first novel, Kenan Orhan 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.
Dilara is a daughter, a wife, and a former school psychologist. She is also an immigrant caring for her father who has dementia, while supporting her husband who has anxiety. She is trying to rebuild her life in Italy after having to flee their home country, Turkey, under Erdogan’s authoritarian government.
As she tries to make space for both men in her life by renovating their second bathroom, some trick of fate leaves her not with the spacious en suite she wanted, but with a room that brings her straight back to Turkey—only it’s a room in Silivri, a prison in Istanbul.
The Renovation is magical realism done right. Its metaphors the perfect tools to illustrate depths of emotion and mental states that go beyond the normal vocabulary. It’s a meditation on grief, identity, memory, activism, immigration, and the many “imprisonments” we encounter in our lives: marriage, parenthood, chronic illness, and corrupt authoritarian governments. It explores the many types of love and guilt we carry as both reward and punishment.
It perfectly captures that liminal zone of existing in an indefinite farewell and feeling trapped in a prison cell long enough that one eventually finds comfort in its familiar torture.
I knew close to nothing about Turkish politics and conflicts, but reading about them made me realize that the human experience is indeed universal. And yes, everything is political. Sadly, there is no escape in a world that isn’t ready for real peace.
As someone living in a third-world country ravaged by political corruption and greed, I can totally relate to the protagonist’s yearning for a homeland—that sense of belonging and identity that is untainted. A country that allows its citizens to exist with equal rights and dignity.
It examines the visceral, personal connection to a nation that is as strong, if not stronger, than any family tie. Is love of nation the same as love of self, and is it worth it? Maybe a home is also a shared delusion: prisons of our own choices, built only from our illusions of safety and settlement.
Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for providing an advance review copy (ARC). All opinions expressed in this review are honest and entirely my own, regardless of whether the book was purchased or provided for free.
Overall rating: 5/5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
About the Author
Kenan Orhan is a writer based in Kansas. His 2023 short story collection, I Am My Country, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and was longlisted for the Story Prize. His fiction appears in the Atlantic, Paris Review, Common and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. The Renovation is his first novel.
Visit his website here.
Book Details
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Magical Realism, Italy, Novels
Format: 256 pages, Hardcover
Published February 10, 2026
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 9780374609429 (ISBN10: 037460942X)
ASIN 037460942X
Language: English
