The Renovation

Guardian Top 10 Debuts of 2026 'A highly inventive debut novel about exile, fear and the ways political trauma follows people across borders' The Times 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. The contractors take weeks to complete the project, while Dilara dreams of a waterfall shower with massaging jets. But when the renovation is done, she discovers a problem: where the bathroom should be, the workmen have instead built a Turkish prison cell. This is a problem for several reasons. One, Dilara left Turkey under a dark cloud seven years ago and prefers not to think about it. Two, Dilara has her hands full with a dying father and a neurotic husband and has no time for absurdist pranks. And three, now Dilara has no bathroom. To make matters worse, she quickly realises that this prison cell is no fake. It is a real prison cell in the middle of a prison in the middle of Istanbul. It is an impossible portal from Italy to Turkey. It is a mystery that she wants no part of. And she can't stop thinking about it. From this brilliantly playful and unexpected opening unfolds a poignant, wise and richly layered novel about family, homesickness and grief, about a shining city on the sea, about the politics of contemporary Europe and the rising tide of history which creeps up around ordinary people, threatening to wash them away.

Kenan Orhan is a writer based in Kansas. His 2023 short story collection, I Am My Country, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and was longlisted for the Story Prize. His fiction appears in the Atlantic, Paris Review, Common and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. The Renovation is his first novel.