Hasan Ali Toptas is one of Turkey’s top writers. His short story collections include The Identity of a Laugh, The Whispers of the Nobodies and Solitudes. His novels have won the Çankaya Literature Prize, the Culture Ministry Prize, the Yunus Nadi Novel Prize, the Cevdet Kudret Literature Prize, the Orhan Kemal Novel Prize and the Turkish Writers’ Union Great Novel Prize. His early masterpiece Shadowless (1995), also translated by Maureen Freely and John Angliss will be published by Bloomsbury in 2016. He now lives in Ankara. He has been translated into German, French and Finnish. Solitudes has been made into a play and Shadowless was made into a film in 1998.Maureen Freely is a novelist and journalist who contributes to the Guardian and the Independent. She translated Orhan Pamuk’s recent novels from Turkish into English. She grew up in Turkey and now lives in England.John Angliss won the inaugural British Council's Young Translators' Prize for prose in 2012. He lives in Ankara.

A wonderful and gripping story. It took me to a seemingly unfamiliar part of the planet and then showed me that there was nothing unfamiliar about it – love is love everywhere, a brother is a brother, betrayal is betrayal. This is news and history made intimate. I am deeply grateful to Hasan Ali Toptas for having told me this story and look forward to others from him