There is a whole strand of Turkish fiction set outside the cities: in villages, in small administrative towns, on cotton fields and in mountain passes. It is sometimes filed under rural realism, and that label makes it sound like a duty. It is not. These are frequently the most propulsive Turkish novels there are — full of feuds, water rights, debt, bandits, weather and people trying to outmanoeuvre one another with very little room to move.
What unites these books is not scenery. It is scarcity: everybody wants the same water, the same field, the same way out, and there is not enough of any of it.
What to expect
Land is a character. In city fiction the setting is a backdrop people move through. Here the soil decides things. A dry year is a plot event. Who owns which field is the central conflict of entire novels.
The casts are wide. Villages come with a headman, a teacher, a landowner, an imam, several households and their grudges. You will meet a lot of people quickly, and some books expect you to keep them straight.
The language can be local. Many of these novels use regional vocabulary, agricultural terms and dialect. Modern editions often include a short glossary. Use it when you need it and ignore it when you do not; you will absorb most words from context by chapter three.
They can be bleak, and they are rarely only bleak. There is a great deal of humour in them, usually dry and at somebody's expense.
Six novels that make good first steps
Ince Memed by Yasar Kemal — published in English as Memed, My Hawk. A young man from a Taurus village goes to the mountains after the landowner who rules it. It reads like legend and moves like a thriller, which is why it is the usual recommended first door.
Kuyucakli Yusuf by Sabahattin Ali — a boy is taken in by a small-town official and grows up inside the town's quiet machinery of favours and cruelty. Short, clean, devastating. Sabahattin Ali's work is out of copyright, so it is easy to find legally for free.
Bereketli Topraklar Uzerinde by Orhan Kemal — three men leave their village for seasonal work. A novel about labour that never stops being a novel about friendship.
Yilanlarin Ocu by Fakir Baykurt — one family, one plot of land, one dispute, told at close range. The best demonstration of how large a small argument can get.
Bizim Koy by Mahmut Makal — not a novel but a village teacher's notebook, written in the early 1950s. Short entries, plain sentences; a useful non-fiction companion to everything above.
Sevgili Arsiz Olum by Latife Tekin — a family moves from a village to the edge of a city, and the prose carries the village's own way of telling stories with it. The most formally adventurous book on this list; start elsewhere if you want something straightforward.
How to read them
Start with one of the shorter ones rather than the longest and most famous. The pleasures here are the same at 180 pages as at 600, and finishing a short one tells you quickly whether the strand is for you.
Do not fight the names. If a cast list of twenty villagers feels like work, read on anyway — these books tend to sort themselves out within a few chapters as the alliances harden, and the techniques in how to read a difficult classic apply here almost word for word.
If this is your first move into Turkish fiction generally, the wider map is in Turkish literature for beginners, and if you would rather test the waters at short length first, Turkish short story writers to start with is the cheaper experiment. For the opposite setting, books set in Istanbul covers the city side.
Why these books travel badly and read brilliantly
Some of this tradition is translated and some of it is not, which means a reader outside Turkey will find Yasar Kemal easily and Fakir Baykurt with difficulty. That is a shame and worth knowing in advance rather than discovering in a bookshop. If you read Turkish, you have the whole shelf.
They also reward being read alongside someone, because the arguments in them are the kind people take sides on: whose claim to the field is fair, whether the protagonist is a hero or a problem. We make Arwy, an Android app that connects you with other people reading the same book while you read it. Being straight about it: our in-app library is public-domain classics and books written by our own users, so most of the in-copyright novels above are not in it — you would read those elsewhere and come to talk about them. There is no iOS version yet either.
Reading Turkish fiction and want to talk about it? Arwy is on Google Play.