The Renovation, by Kenan Orhan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Dilara, the protagonist of this début novel, is consumed by the absence of a stable home in her life. She and her family flee Turkey, where she is from, after a failed coup in 2016. When they end up in Italy, something inexplicable happens: Dilara’s bathroom transforms into a cell in an infamous prison on the outskirts of Istanbul. But Dilara is accustomed to the surreal, having escaped conditions where working for the wrong newspaper or studying at the wrong school could result in arrest. Indeed, she finds herself increasingly drawn to the cell, where time and space collapse. Orhan produces a haunting meditation on memory and displacement that reconsiders the meaning of liberation.
Simple Heart, by Cho Haejin, translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang (Other Press). In this novel of remembrance and personal discovery, a Korean woman adopted and raised by French parents returns to Seoul with a documentarian in order to excavate her buried past. Complicating the woman’s journey through her homeland is her newly discovered pregnancy. As she and the documentarian revisit the locales of her fractured childhood, she meditates on the future of her baby and on her own upbringing. Haejin’s prose is soft and mysterious, with a drifting, almost Sebaldian quality. Often, she delves into the history of Korean place-names and terms—tangents that provide some of the novel’s most touching passages.