Nilay wants to go from Berlin to Istanbul, ideally tonight. For weeks now, she has been following the news about Taksim Square with her parents: the images, the protests, the cries for freedom. Selim and Hülya have lost their temper. They used to be the children out on the streets of İzmir—that is, before the coup in September 1980. Years of arbitrariness followed, but they believed in a future in Turkey. After all, they had one another and they did find their ways of resistance. Thirty years later, their daughter wants to go back to the very country that Selim and Hülya had abandoned hoping to find freedom elsewhere. With a strong sense of urgency and foresight, Özge İnan tells the story of a family who does not surrender, a story of friendship and treason, of love and anger in her first novel “Natürlich kann man hier nicht leben” (Of Course You Cannot Live Here), published in Piper 2023.
Book presentation and conversation with
Özge İnan
Journalist, Author, Lawyer, Berlin
Hosted by
Maria Piok
Head of Literaturhaus am Inn
