Sabahattin Ali · 1943 · exile

Sabahattin Ali's 1943 novel, ignored for fifty years and now a Turkish bestseller. A clerk in Ankara notices that his silent colleague Raif Efendi is treated as a nobody by everyone including his own family - and then reads the notebook he keeps, which is about a woman he met in Berlin in 1923 and one month that decided the rest of his life.

1. 1
   Havran

   A soap-making family in western Anatolia, a father who tells him he should have been born a girl, and a boy who reads romantic novels and draws instead - and is packed off abroad to learn a trade he has no interest in.

2. 2
   Berlin

   He ignores the letters from home, learns German, reads Russian novels and walks the city end to end. At an exhibition he stops in front of a self-portrait of a woman in a wildcat pelt and cannot move, and goes back to it daily.

3. 3
   Ankara

   Years later he is a translator of German documents in a government office, supporting relatives who despise him, saying almost nothing to anyone - and the notebook in his desk is the only place the month in Berlin still exists.