Selim Özdogan – författare

Part one of the Anatolian Blues trilogyTold with great affection for his characters, Selim Özdoğan’s trilogy traces out the life of Gül, a Turkish girl who grows up in 1950s Anatolia and then moves to Germany as a migrant worker. Book one details her initially idyllic childhood, ruptured by her mother’s early death. Ever close to her loving father, Gül grows into a warm-hearted, hard-working young woman. The Blacksmith’s Daughter is a novel full of carefree summers and hard winters, old wives’ tales and young people’s ambitions – the melancholy beauty and pain of an ordinary life. ‘Fatih Akın says of Selim Özdoğan’s new novel: “If everyone read this book, the world would be a better place – more considerate, more liveable, more tolerant.” Believe him!’ Brigitte magazine

‘You’ll live out your lives in a foreign country,’ Gül is warned. But the whole world is foreign when you’re far from your loved ones. The train ride to Germany ushers in the days of long-awaited letters, night-time telephone calls and blissful summers back home. The years of hard work will flow like water before her house in Turkey is built and she can return. Until then, there will be fireworks, young love, and the cassette tapes of the summer played on repeat. In these years, Gül will learn all kinds of longing: for her two daughters, for her father, for scents, colours and fruit. Yet Factory Lane in this cold, incomprehensible country becomes a different kind of home.A novel about how home is found in many places from the author of The Blacksmith's Daughter (9783863912949)‘Honest, urgent and emotional.’ Augsburger Allgemeine‘An absolutely recommended novel that quietly stimulates the reader’s thoughts and portrays the hard work behind seeing a new country as home.’ migazin

‘There are three ways to face life: put up with it, fight or flee.’ After eight years in Turkey, Gül leaves her native Anatolia and returns to Germany. Reunited with her husband Fuat, she observes life there from the margins. As age gives her ever deeper insight, she sees society change rapidly, and yet her ability to connect to the people around her remains constant. Gül’s life is shaped by the melancholy of separation, but with her warm-hearted and accepting outlook she has learned to endure homesickness and longing. Full of emotions and poetry but told without sentimentality, Selim Özdoğan’s account of Gül’s journey is a tender and moving novel about home, cultural identity and a life between two worlds.‘Anchored in the circumstances of this century and yet timeless, this is the story of exiles and homecomings, of silences and distances and loneliness but with a hopefulness at its heart. Above all it is a story about women and age: an old woman’s careful, thoughtful, analytic eye reflecting on motherhood, friendship, marriage, survival. This book is full of wisdom.’ Jane Campbell, author of Cat Brushing