Mushfik is a young man growing up in Turkey, first in Sarikum, a small coastal village, and later in urban Istanbul. He comes of age in an atmosphere of sublimated, disoriented eroticism, his impulses restrained by religious and sexual taboos, rigid gender roles, stifling maternal love, and the enforced silences of social decorum. Unable to adapt easily to society's unspoken rules, he is driven to the point of insanity from which he must slowly and painfully return.

Told from several points of view and structured in a series of intersecting flashbacks and interior monologues,...