The third novel-in-translation from Turkish author Defne Suman, Summer Heat sees a mysterious meeting between which threatens to unravel generations-long secrets.
Defne Suman Book order
Defne Süman's work delves into the intricate themes of collective forgetting and remembering, trauma, and the repression and uncovering of truth on both personal and societal levels. She explores questions of identity, notably the connection between language and identity, covert identities, and their malleability. Her narratives often confront a pluralistic notion of selfhood against monolithically constructed national identities, intertwining paradigms of exile and displacement with speaking from minority positions. Süman's writing discerns the philosophical core of human existence through profound analysis of the psyche and social dynamics.
- 2024
- 2022
Told from four different perspectives, At the Breakfast Table is a story of hidden histories and family secrets, from the author of The Silence of Scheherazade. Prinkipo Island, Turkey, 2017. In the glow of a late summer morning, family gather for the 100th birthday of the famous artist Sirin Saka. It ought to be a time of fond reminiscence, looking back on a long and fruitful artistic career, on memories spanning almost a century, but also of an era when imperial forces fought over her homeland. But the deep past is something Sirin has spent a lifetime trying to conceal. Her grandchildren, Nur and Fikret, and great grandchild, Selin, do not know what Sirin is hiding, though they are intimately aware of the secret's psychological consequences. The siblings invite family friend and investigative journalist Burak along to interview Sirin for his weekly column in celebration of her 100th year. They hope he will help unravel the family secrets and persuade her to talk. Sirin's life-long servant, Sadik, is determined to do all he can to protect the artist. Eventually Sirin begins to express her pain the only way she knows how. She paints the story onto her dining room wall, revealing a history wiped from public consciousness and the cause of her family's anguish that has sat, ruinous, in their subconscious for generations.
- 2021
September 1905. At the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in the ancient city of Smyrna, Scheherazade is born to an opium-dazed mother. At the very same moment, an Indian spy sails into the golden-hued, sycamore-scented city with a secret mission from the British Empire. When he leaves, 17 years later, it will be to the smell of kerosene and smoke as the city, and its people, are engulfed in flames. Told through the intertwining fates of a Levantine, a Greek, a Turkish and an Armenian family, this unforgettable novel reveals a city, and a culture, now lost to time.
