Turkey is a nation of contradictions and contrasts. Though considered democratic, the Erdogan government has increasingly begun to resemble a dictatorship, jailing it opponents and violently suppressing dissent. And though Turkey is notionally secular, the Justice and Development Party's power has fed the creeping influence of religious conservatism, with figures in the party denouncing abortion rights and attempting to criminalize adultery. Having long occupied an uneasy middle ground between a secular West and Islamic East, Turkey has been drawn into the conflicts of its neighbors,...

Our Best Love Story traces the end of a romance as an unnamed narrator wanders the streets of his city, attempting to endure his new solitude, taking refuge in remembered places and imagined companions. Told in a series of fragments, the novel wrestles powerfully but playfully with its own obligation to craft a satisfying story of love's formation, its decay, and its eventual end. Ultimately, Levi's novel asks readers to consider whether books, stories, reading, writing, the artificial life and companionship found in literature, can ever truly form an adequate response to the...