The Renovation; by Kenan Orhan

A door to Istanbul in a house in Italy

Dilara ordered a bathroom. She lives in Baronissi, a small town in the hills above Salerno, and her father is moving in with her. In Istanbul he was a professor, a novelist and an outspoken public voice. Now Alzheimer's takes a little more of him each day, and the new bathroom is meant to make his days easier. When the builders leave, she opens the door and finds a cell. It has bars, a guard pacing outside, and women on the other side of the wall speaking Turkish. The cell is part of Silivri Prison in Istanbul, and it is also part of her apartment.

The contractor is unmoved. He sends her scans of her own signature approving every material and fixture, and hangs up.

The family left Turkey about ten years ago, after the Gezi Park protests of 2013 and the pressure that followed on her father. Dilara had been a school psychologist. In Italy she found no work in her field, drifted away from her mother tongue, and became a housewife. Her husband, who is never named, reads the cell as a sign that the Turkish authorities have found them, and he leaves. Dilara stays, with her father and the cell.

And she keeps going back. In the cell she smells fresh simit, hears the call to prayer and her mother's voice, and feels the salt of the Marmara settle on her skin. Memories arrive while she sits there and drain away when she steps out. In the next room her father loses his words one by one, and at last her name. The father is losing a past he wants to keep. The daughter is handed back a past she had put away.

Orhan tells all of this with a straight face. Nobody explains the cell, the guards refuse to believe Dilara's story, and daily life goes on with the same bills and the same fatigue. That is where the comedy comes from. The Booker Prize judges wrote that the book had some of them laughing out loud, and added that the laughter has an unsettling side. The novel is dedicated to caregivers, and that may be its truest key. Before the cell stands for exile, it stands for the life of anyone whose days and nights belong to the care of someone they love.

Kenan Orhan is a Turkish American writer based in Kansas City. He holds an MFA from Emerson College and has received an O. Henry Prize. His story collection I Am My Country, published in 2023, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. The Renovation is his first novel, and it grew out of one of his own short stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it in the United States on February 10, 2026, at 256 pages, and Hamish Hamilton followed in the United Kingdom on March 26. It is longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize and, as of last week, for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction.

A reader who has carried a city across a border will know the rooms of this book.

Three reviews

Kirkus Reviews
The reviewer calls the novel a claustrophobic and captivating allegory about family, country and the failure of memory. Apart from its single impossibility, Orhan plays everything straight, and the premise is soon overtaken by the real thread of the story, which is how little of what is lost can be recovered. The verdict is an odd, elegant book whose sincerity is disarming.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kenan-orhan/the-renovation/

Harvard Review, Victoria Zhuang
Zhuang hears in the opening an echo of Gregor Samsa waking in Kafka's The Metamorphosis. For her the cell comes to hold every other confinement in Dilara's life, the roles she plays for others, age, caregiving and exile itself. She gives the highest praise to the prose, and notes that a Turkish writer choosing English and an Italian setting adds one more layer of distance from home.
https://www.harvardreview.org/book-review/the-renovation/

The Indiependent
This review finds the label of magical realism too small for the book. With its tension and unease it reads closer to a political thriller, and the pace is relentless even while the subjects are grief, duty and family. The reviewer calls it an exceptional debut.
https://www.indiependent.co.uk/book-review-the-renovation-kenan-orhan/