Every Fire You Tend

Product Description In 1938, in the remote Dersim region of Eastern Anatolia, the Turkish Republic launched an operation to erase an entire community of Zaza-speaking Alevi Kurds. Inspired by those brutal events, and the survival of Kaygusuzs own grandmother, this densely lyrical and allusive novel grapples with the various inheritances of genocide, gendered violence and historical memory as they reverberate across time and place from within the unnamed protagonists home in contemporary Istanbul. Kaygusuz imagines a narrative anchored by the weight of anguish and silence, fuelled by mysticism, wisdom and beauty. This is a powerful exploration of a still-taboo subject, deeply significant to the fault lines of modern-day Turkey. Review Eschewing western minimalism, [her] stories comes clothed in fantastical colours and sudden brutalities. Here be talking snakes, fierce grandfathers, stigmata, cheated wives, an army officers collapse after the death of a young soldier hes just abused, and what its like when your mum, filled with fear, starts screaming at you about anal sex. I loved every page. --Irish Times[Kaygusuz] has a bluntness which tends to both quicken the pace but also turns the mystical into direct observations. --Asian Review of BooksIf anyone needed further evidence of the power and value of short stories,The Well of Trapped Words by Turkish writer Sema Kaygusuz makes a compelling case. Peopled with outcasts, misfits, trauma survivors and eccentrics, the collection makes for arresting reading. --A Year of Reading the World