The Renovation

Kenan Orhan author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd

Published:26th Mar '26

£16.99

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The Renovation cover

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026

Guardian Top 10 Debut Novels of 2026

The Renovation is a playful and poignant portrait of one family caught in the tides of history, grappling with grief, exile, politics and the painful absurdity of love

Dilara is renovating her apartment. She wants a brand-new waterfall shower with massage jets; she wants a marble bench and a double vanity unit. But when the renovation is done, she discovers a problem. Where the bathroom should be, the workmen have instead built a Turkish prison cell.

At first she is outraged. Is this a prank? A mistake? A veiled threat? Dilara’s family are exiles – they left Turkey many years ago and have never been back. The last thing she wants is a piece of her homeland appearing uninvited in her new home.

But as the weeks pass, her indignation gives way to curiosity. Beyond the cell door, she glimpses Turkish prison guards going about their work. Through the cell walls, she hears Turkish prisoners pacing, rustling, talking in their sleep. And in the strange, impossible air of the cell itself, she smells the sesame scent of freshly baked simit bread, she tastes the fine dust of the Anatolian steppe on her tongue.

Dilara has no shortage of responsibilities, worries, real problems. She has a dying father, a highly neurotic husband, a dwindling savings account and no job. And yet she finds herself drawn back again and again to the mysterious prison cell, and through it to a city that once belonged to her – to the salt wind off the Marmara, the sky full of gulls and domes and minarets – back to Istanbul.

'A highly inventive debut novel about exile, fear and the ways political trauma follows people across borders' The Times

I love this book — it’s a book club host’s dream. I was electrified by the conceit… I felt like I was falling through a series of trap doors. I call these ‘Trojan horse books’: zany top level, really deep interior, with a bunch of surprises * New York Times Book Review (MJ Franklin on The Book Club Podcast) *
Lyrical, Kafka-esque... The premise is inventive, the symbolism astute, the prose clean and neat and frequently beautiful... Leaving your homeland, we discover, is a series of constant losses * The Times *
A superb first novel, impressive on every level... At once an urgent allegory about what it is to live in exile, it’s equally a powerful, visceral and heartbreakingly uncompromising portrait of dementia * Daily Mail *
I mean, I loved this book. The first name that comes to mind for me is Kafka… I did not see [the ending] coming, but after I read it and put the book down, I realized that was the only way it could end * New York Times Book Review (Dave Kim on The Book Club Podcast) *
A haunting meditation on memory and displacement that reconsiders the meaning of liberation * New Yorker *
Addictive and chilling, yet so sensitive, so beautifully told – like Kafka by way of Pedro Almodóvar – I couldn’t put it 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'
Truly original, this debut novel grips from start to finish * Elle *
A surreal novel of migration and memory [which] follows Orhan’s celebrated 2023 story collection * Guardian *
Surreal, mysterious, engrossing... A domestic drama shaped by the political turbulence of the Erdogan era * Mail on Sunday *
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'

ISBN: 9780241745779

Dimensions: 225mm x 145mm x 24mm

Weight: 354g

256 pages