Endgame - Softcover

“The time has come to tell you what happened.”

From the opening pages of Ahmet Altan’s remarkable novel, you are drawn by its enigmatic narrator into a murder mystery that will have you guessing until its final pages. Superbly translated by Alexander Dawe, this detective story turned on its head is provocative, funny, playful and wise—a book that is as erotic as it is gripping.

Already published to great acclaim in Altan’s native Turkey, Endgame introduces a major international writer to readers in the English-speaking world. Reminiscent of the fiction of Calvino, Fitzgerald and Fowles, this is a novel of startling originality that tackles serious ideas with a delightful lightness of touch. And it is a reading experience that you are unlikely to ever forget.

Born in 1950, AHMET ALTAN became a journalist before publishing his first novel at age 27, Four Seasons of Autumn, which won the Grand Award of the Akademi Publishing House. His second novel, Trace on the Water, was banned due to obscenity and later published as Dangerous Tales, which sold over 200,000 copies. Like a Sword Wound, published in 1998, won the Yunus Nadi Novel Prize, its sales surpassing 500,000 copies. In 2009, along with Roberto Saviano, Altan was awarded the prestigious Prize for the Freedom and Future of the Media by the Media Foundation of the Sparkasse Leipzig. In 2011, he received the International Hrant Dink Award, an award that has been presented since 2009 in the name of the assassinated Armenian journalist and author Hrant Dink.

ALEXANDER DAWE was born in New York and now lives and works in Istanbul. He received a PEN translation fund to translate the collected short stories of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. He worked with Maureen Freely on a new translation of Tanpinar’s novel The Time Regulation Institute.