Published in 2023 (first published 1980)
96 pages
Tezer Özlü was born in 1943 in Turkey and lived in Paris, Ankara, Istanbul, Berlin, and Zurich, where she died in 1986. Cold Nights of Childhood is her first novel to be translated into English.
Maureen Freely is a writer, translator, and Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies and a member of English PEN. She is the author of six novels, three works of non-fiction and is the translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.
What is this book about?
The narrator of Cold Nights of Childhood grows up in a rapidly changing Turkey, where the atmosphere is nationalist, patriarchal, technocratic. As a misfit in search of freedom, love and happiness, she escapes to Berlin, is overcome by depression on her return, and trapped in a psychiatry clinic for five years. After electroshock therapy and inhumane treatment, she is released into the care of friends and family, making tentative steps in a halting journey towards recovery.
In her unique, unstructured style, Tezer Özlü explores the extremity of her inner life and the painful pleasures of memory. Translated into English for the first time by Maureen Freely, this novel is a classic akin to The Bell Jar and Good Morning, Midnight.
