The idiot elif batuman barnes and noble5/25/2023 ![]() ![]() An indelible character at once precocious and imperiled, Leyla gives voice to the working-class and immigrant struggle to find safety, self-expression, and happiness. While she waits for the German court’s verdict on her future, in the pages of her diary, Leyla begins to parse her unresolved past and untenable present. Will she accept an IKEA life with the Volvo salesman and relinquish her creative dreams, or return to Turkey to her mother and sister, codependent and enmeshed, her father’s ghost still haunting their lives? Right as the clock winds down on the hold on her visa, Leyla meets a conservative Swedish tourist and-against her political convictions and better judgment-begins to fall in love, or something like it. Increasingly distant from what used to be at arm’s reach-writerly ambitions, tight-knit friendships, a place to call home-Leyla attempts to find solace in the techno beats of Berlin’s nightlife, with little success. It’s 2017 and Leyla, a Turkish twentysomething living in Berlin is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland–themed hostel after failing her thesis, losing her student visa, and suing her German university in a Kafkaesque attempt to reverse her fate. ![]() Out now from Grove Press IN THE us IN AUGUST IN THE UK FROM CORSAIR/LITTLE BROWN ![]()
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