52 Factory Lane

"You'll live out your lives in a foreign country," Gül is warned. But the whole world is foreign when you're far from your loved ones. The train ride to Germany ushers in the days of long-awaited letters, night-time telephone calls and blissful summers back home. The years of hard work will flow like water before her house in Turkey is built and she can return.

Until then, there will be fireworks, young love, and the cassette tapes of the summer played on repeat. In these years, Gül will learn all kinds of longing: for her two daughters, for her father the blacksmith, for scents and colours and fruit. Yet imperceptibly, Factory Lane in this cold, incomprehensible country becomes a different kind of home.

A novel about how home is found in many places and yet still eludes us.

Auteur

Selim Özdogan was born in Germany in 1971 and has been publishing his prose since 1995. He has won numerous prizes and grants and taught creative writing at the University of Michigan.

Ayça Türkoglu is a writer and literary translator based in North London. Her translation interests include the literature of the Turkish diaspora in Germany and minority literatures in Turkey.

Katy Derbyshire, born in London and based in Berlin for more than twenty years, translates contemporary German writers. Her published work includes books by Clemens Meyer, Christa Wolf, Heike Geissler and Olga Grjasnowa.