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The Renovation

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What to expect

**LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026**

A dazzlingly original new voice in literary fiction for fans of Ali Smith, Mohsin Hamid and Elif Shafak

The Renovation is a heart-breaking portrait of one family caught in the tides of history, grappling with grief, exile, politics and the painful absurdity of love

Dilara’s father is disappearing.

He has dementia and the disease steals a little more of him each day. Dilara has persuaded him to move in with her, hiring builders to adapt her apartment in preparation, but when the renovation is complete she discovers a big problem. Instead of a new bathroom, the builders have installed a Turkish prison cell.

At first she is outraged. There has surely been some mistake. Dilara’s family are exiles – they left Turkey many years ago and have never been back. The last thing she wants is a piece of her estranged homeland appearing uninvited in her new home.

But as the weeks pass, her indignation gives way to curiosity. Beyond the cell door, she glimpses Turkish guards going about their work. Through the cell walls, she hears Turkish prisoners murmuring, rustling, crying out in their sleep. And in the strange, impossible air of the cell itself, she smells the sesame scent of freshly baked simit, she tastes the fine dust of the Anatolian steppe on her tongue.

Even as she struggles to care for her father, to keep the family finances afloat and stop the wheels coming off her marriage, Dilara is drawn back again and again to the mysterious prison cell, and through it to a city that once belonged to her – to the salt wind off the Marmara, the sky full of gulls and domes and minarets – back to Istanbul.

© Kenan Orhan 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Critics Review

I love this book — it’s a book club host’s dream. I was electrified by the conceit… I felt like I was falling through a series of trap doors. I call these ‘Trojan horse books’: zany top level, really deep interior, with a bunch of surprises
New York Times Book Review (MJ Franklin on The Book Club Podcast)
Lyrical, Kafka-esque... The premise is inventive, the symbolism astute, the prose clean and neat and frequently beautiful... Leaving your homeland, we discover, is a series of constant losses
The Times
A superb first novel, impressive on every level... At once an urgent allegory about what it is to live in exile, it’s equally a powerful, visceral and heartbreakingly uncompromising portrait of dementia
Daily Mail
I mean, I loved this book. The first name that comes to mind for me is Kafka… I did not see [the ending] coming, but after I read it and put the book down, I realized that was the only way it could end
New York Times Book Review (Dave Kim on The Book Club Podcast)
A haunting meditation on memory and displacement that reconsiders the meaning of liberation
New Yorker
Addictive and chilling, yet so sensitive, so beautifully told – like Kafka by way of Pedro Almodóvar – I couldn’t put it down and I didn’t want it to end. Kenan Orhan is a truly gifted writer, drawing us down into a tunnel of memory and madness
Avni Doshi, author of 'Burnt Sugar'
Truly original, this debut novel grips from start to finish
Elle
A surreal novel of migration and memory [which] follows Orhan’s celebrated 2023 story collection
Guardian
Surreal, mysterious, engrossing... A domestic drama shaped by the political turbulence of the Erdogan era
Mail on Sunday
Elegant, propulsive and wholly original, The Renovation is a profound meditation on familial duties, memory, displacement and the devastating longing for a home that exists solely in the past. It will stay with me for a long time
Cecile Pin, author of 'Wandering Souls'
Author Kenan Orhan
Narrator Nadia Albina
Duration 6 hours and 39 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781405989152
Format Audiobook
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Genre Coping with ageing, Family life fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Displacement, exile, migration, Narrative theme: health and illness
Collections The Booker Prize Longlist 2026
Availability AU, GB, IE

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