Leyla is the youngest of three sisters and two brothers brought up in a small Anatolian town in the 1950s. The children adore their long-suffering mother Ermine, but suffer frequent abuse at the hands of their father, Halid Bey, a violent, dominating, illiterate Chechen refugee. The family live in poverty as a result of Halid抯 inability to make a success of any of his opportunities, and he compensates for his social failure by ruling his family like a capricious pasha. The mother and children evolve into a cohesive unit as they seek to survive domestic trauma and financial misfortune.

After a time the family moves to Istanbul, where, to begin with, their fortunes improve. Soon, however, the father抯 instability leads them once more through the old cycles of prosperity and poverty. Leyla requires all the determination learned from her mother to make a success of a marriage against the odds, and strives to carve a better niche � outside Turkey if necessary. Set in the Turkey of the Cold War years, caught between the forces of nationalism and political radicalism, Leyla marks a daring departure for the maverick Zaimoglu. A world away from his wickedly sharp takes on Turkish- German youth and language, here he offers us insights into the Turkey of his childhood � and pulls off the tricky feat of narrating his tale through the eyes of a female protagonist.

This could be the work to introduce an English-language readership to one of the most vibrant of voices � and personalities � of contemporary German-language literature.

born in 1964 in Bolu, Anatolia, has lived in Germany for thirty-five years. He studied art and medicine in Kiel, where he now lives and works as a writer, screenwriter and journalist. He was a columnist for the supplement of Die Zeit, and he also writes for Die Welt, Frankfurter Rundschau, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2002, he was awarded the Hebbel Prize, the jury prize in the Bachmann competition in Klagenfurt in 2003, and in 2004 the Adalbert von Chamisso Prize. In 2005 he received a residential scholarship at the Villa Massimo in Rome.