Description

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

Publisher Review

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 * Addictive and chilling, yet so sensitive, so beautifully told – like Kafka by way of Pedro Almodovar – 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’ 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’ The Renovation brilliantly describes what it’s like for “elsewhere” to be “here”. An instant entry not just into the canon of migrant literature but into the literature of now — Isabel Waidner, author of ‘Sterling Karat Gold’ Written with a slyly comic touch, The Renovation has at its heart an unexpected and powerfully charged emotional space. There are encounters between Dilara and her ageing, exiled father that will stay with me for a long time to come — Chetna Maroo, author of ‘Western Lane’ Elegant, disarming, evocative… [An] allegory about family, country, and the failure of memory * Kirkus * Tender [and] astonishing * Booklist *