Translated by Saliha Paker and Mel Kenne

'A nihilistic wit reminiscent of Samuel Beckett' Independent on Sunday

'Only comparable, in my experience, with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude' The Herald

'Unforgettable... She has written down what before has never been written down' John Berger

'Dear Shameless Death is a wonderful read that tells the fascinating tale and occasionally brutal tale of a young girl growing up in modern Turkey...A classic of 20th Century Turkish fiction.' Morning Star

A strange, magical story of a young girl growing up in a modern Turkey, from her birth in a small rural village haunted by fairies and demons to her traumatic move to the big city. Based on her own childhood experiences, Latife Tekin's literary debut marked a turning point in Turkish fiction. Set against the pressures of a rapidly changing society it concentrates on a daughter's struggle against her overbearing mother. Fantastic and hallucinatory, Dear Shameless Death provides fascinating insights into what it means to be a woman growing up in Turkey today.

'Tekin started writing Dear Shameless Death, in 1980, a few days after the military coup d’état. She was twenty-three and wanted it to be ‘a razzle-dazzle novel, a book full of sound and shimmering light, whichever way you looked at it.’ She succeeded. It is expansive, full of rural superstitions, myths, fairy tales and idiosyncratic characters. The first part, set in a small Anatolian village is particularly fantastic, populated with djinns, a fair-haired and malevolent witch and ‘donkey boy’, all of whom the child protagonist, Dirmit, believes in implicitly. Based on Tekin’s own childhood experiences, it is a fascinating mixture of extraordinary imaginings fused with the commonplace details of village life...Dear Shameless Death is an impressive, imaginative novel. It is also a gift to Tekin’s family and village neighbours: a remembrance of their lives.' Edinburgh Review

Latife Tekin is the author of Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills and Swords of Ice, also available from Marion Boyars, described by The Women's Review of Books as 'a small masterpiece of beauty'.

£8.99
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0-7145-3054-9
Fiction