Endgame

Named one of Washington Post’s 50 Notable Books of 2017

Despite widespread political censorship and crackdowns by the Erdoğan regime, Ahmet Altan bravely crafts a novel about the ways in which corruption envelops contemporary Turkish life. Endgame is an atmospheric and enigmatic literary noir, in which an unnamed writer visits a small town and finds himself involved in a mystery with existentialist implications.

A womanizing writer who has lived his entire life in the city retires to a sunbaked Turkish village. Instead of the quiet life he hoped for, he encounters a world of suspicion, paranoia, and violence. The town's mayor is both his only real ally and his greatest nemesis; his lover shares an ambiguous past with the mayor; the town seems hell-bent on turning him into a murderer; and, he is initiated into the town's biggest secret only to discover this knowledge will become a weapon used against him.

The protagonist of this bestselling existential page-turner is an appealingly untrustworthy narrator whose story transports the reader into a world of lust, ambition, small-town politics, and death. A detective story turned on its head, Endgame is compellingly infused with a dreamlike logic reminiscent of Paul Auster and Graham Greene.

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Endgame

Named one of Washington Post’s 50 Notable Books of 2017

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Endgame

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Endgame

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Overview

Named one of Washington Post’s 50 Notable Books of 2017

Product Details
About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609453770
Publisher:	Europa Yearbook
Publication date:	04/18/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Ahmet Altan, one of today’s most important Turkish writers, was arrested in September 2016 for his work as a journalist. An advocate for Kurdish and Armenian minorities and a central figure in the Turkish cultural world (Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk has written about his arrest and signed a open letter calling for his release), he is the author of five successful novels. The first, published when he was twenty-seven years old, won the Grand Prix from the Akademi Publishing House. In 2009 he received the prestigious Freedom and Future of the Media Prize from the Media Foundation of Sparkasse Leipzig and in 2011 he received the International Hrant Dink Award. The international bestseller Endgame is his English-language debut.

From the B&N Reads Blog

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Editorial Reviews

02/20/2017
Small-town tensions over an old secret boil over in this metaphysical noir by Altan (Four Seasons of Autumn). A nameless writer moves to a small and picturesque Turkish town to work on his next novel, but before he even gets off the plane he becomes enthralled with a beautiful, locally connected woman named Zuhal. Through her the writer forms relationships, including with Mustafa, the mayor of the town, who has a complicated past with Zuhal and occupies a strange role as both the writer’s natural enemy and true friend. Over time, as the narrator becomes more involved with the citizens and local politics, he is drawn into crime, sex, and a legend involving a treasure on a hill. Interspersed throughout the narrative are existential discussions with God about the nature of writing, life, and the creation of characters. These passages serve to warn us that something horrible is coming, that the narrator will commit a terrible act. Altan’s work is at once atmospheric and distant, with shifts from discussions with and about God to the narrator’s abstruse relationships with the people of the town, particularly Zuhal. Still, each of the threads are artfully crafted and do come together nicely by the end, as promised. Altan’s characters are, at times, difficult to penetrate, but his story is pointed, enigmatic, and difficult to forget. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Endgame
“Although it offers an implicit critique of Turkey’s corrupt justice system, Endgame is also comic and charmingly absurd, largely due to the reckless efforts of its characters to get even.”
—The Washington Post

“Existential questions perfectly blended with atmosphere and rat-a-tat prose; highly recommended.”
—Library Journal (Starred Review)
"A gripping existential thriller in the vein of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (2006)."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Atlan's work is at once atmospheric and distant [...]. Each of the threads are artfully crafted and do come together nicely by the end, as promised. Altan's characters are, at times, difficult to penetrate, but his story is pointed, enigmatic, and difficult to forget."
—Publishers Weekly
"Endgame is a rare beast: a mystery adventure in the age of internet, of such intimately written humanity that it transcends genre, time and place. If Steinbeck had written The Godfather it might have read like this."
—DBC Pierre, author of Vernon God Little
"Endgame is deeply political. It is populated by characters who try to grab that hypothetical treasure on the hill and in so doing tear their local paradise apart. Altan has a deep understanding of what drives them on. It is all very serious but also great fun."
—The Guardian
"A deeply compelling and immersive narrative about love, desire, loneliness and landscape. Ahmet Altan is one of the foremost voices in Turkish literature and has much to say to the world."
—Elif Shafak, author of The Bastard of Istanbul and The Architect's Apprentice
"Altan pushes the tropes of detective fiction into existentialist territory."
—The New Yorker, Briefly Noted
"An impassioned, captivating dance, a waltz between death and desire that does not release you for even a single moment."
—Philippe Sands, author of East West Street
"Endgame is a complex and immensely readable book—insightful, disturbing, irritating and riveting."
—Andrea Wulf, author of the Invention of Nature
"Extraordinary, delicious, wise."
—Linn Ullmann, author of The Cold Song

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2017
Stylish, inventive, and deliciously dark, Altan's U.S. debut is both an absorbing thriller and an intensive novel of ideas; no wonder he's an award-winning and best-selling author in his native Turkey. The nameless narrator, a lackluster novelist, impulsively abandons city life for a small coastal town and falls immediately for the beautiful, evasive Zuhal, whose former lover is the all-powerful mayor. The village looks placid enough, but there's menace beneath the surface; the townsfolk avoid him, mafia-style killings are prevalent, and a buried treasure on the hill beckons. The mayor has his own reasons for befriending the narrator, who is soon drawn into a venture that spirals violently out of his control. Meanwhile, comparisons abound between novelists and God, who can get away with a lot more, and we're left wondering if we are in control of our lives the way the novelist is in control of his characters. VERDICT Existential questions perfectly blended with atmosphere and rat-a-tat prose; highly recommended.

Library Journal

2017-02-06
A jaded crime novelist retires to a Turkish village on the brink of civil war.The clichés of noir literature are infamously tricky to navigate, and many of those archetypes and tropes surface in this elegant crime novel by Turkish journalist and author Altan, his first to be translated into English. Thankfully, the author uses both characters and devices to marvelous effect, creating a hallucinatory fiction that reads as much like The Stranger (1942) as it does The Godfather (1969). It begins with a man admitting he has just murdered someone. From there, our nameless narrator (a crime writer, naturally) spins a dizzying tale about the small Turkish village where he enters semiretirement. A world-weary, womanizing writer is a well-worn chestnut, but Altan breathes life into his virile hero with interesting flaws. Taking his place as the "coffeehouse sage" of the village, the writer quickly becomes enmeshed by its internal strife. He falls in love with Zuhal, a woman whose heart belongs to the corrupt mayor, Mustafa Gürz. This doesn't stop him from dallying with Kamile (the femme fatale wife of a local crime boss) or frequenting the bedroom of Sümbül (a prostitute with a heart of gold). It's a town laden with gang violence, much of it sparked by the rumor of a Roman treasure buried underneath a Christian church. "It might seem strange to an outsider but after living in the town for long enough you got used to the killing and the fact that certain killers go free," Altan writes. "It even begins to seem natural for them to shoot each other in broad daylight." The book isn't without flaws—Altan is enamored with internet chats between our hero and Zuhal, and readers seeking a traditional whodunit may be left wanting. But readers looking for a contemplative, twisty thriller will find this one unique and satisfying. A gripping existential thriller in the vein of Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (2006).

Kirkus Reviews

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