In Eray s world of fantasy and fun, there are few boundaries between reality and imagination. There is a roadside tea garden where spirits gather by night to carry on flirtations until they fade into the dawn, and there is a tavern in Bartin where men make their lost illusions of love come alive by thinking of them. The narrator exchanges places with Night for twenty-four hours to find out what it means to be the unsleeping night, the guardian of dreams. The slot machines in a casino provide love advice and clues to the multiple realities of romance, history, and everyday life. In these...

The Black Rose of Halfeti opens with a letter delivered at midnight in Ankara, Turkey. In this letter, an elderly doctor who has begun to experience the first signs of dementia professes his love and desire for a relationship with the narrator, a woman in middle age beginning to contemplate her own mortality. From there, the novel moves between Mardin, Izmir, and Ankara; the past and the present; and the real and the imagined as the narrator seeks to know the doctor both in his prime and in his struggle to hold senility at bay. In these dreamlike landscapes, the author...