The most literal book on this year's Booker longlist is also the strangest. Dilara, a Turkish exile in a village outside Salerno, hires builders to add a second bathroom so she can care for her father, who has dementia. They install a Turkish prison cell instead, staffed, and somehow wired to a prison in Istanbul. Kenan Orhan writes from Kansas and has not let the Gezi-to-purges decade go; his 2023 story collection was a PEN/Robert W. Bingham finalist. The device reads as a stunt for roughly ten pages and then stops being one. Longlisted July 28 from 163 submissions; shortlist September 22. Hamish Hamilton, March 26, 256 pages, £16.99.
8.0SCORECROWNROOM'S RIGHTHEAT 67▮
ROOM'S RIGHT — the room is loud, and the room is correct.
BENCHMARK IN THE 50 · Noname Book Club — the nearest thing on the 50, and the fit is by reading habit rather than root
THE MUSA FAMILY · HEIRWAVE
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