Cold Nights of Childhood - Paperback

by Tezer Özlü (Author), Maureen Freely (Translator), Aysegül Savas (Introduction by)

"A profoundly moving account of desperation, exhilaration, and endurance."--Kirkus Reviews

The Bell Jar meets Good Morning, Midnight, by one of Turkey's most beloved writers.

The narrator of Tezer Özlü's novel is between lovers. She is in and out of psychiatric wards, where she is forced to undergo electroshock treatments. She is between Berlin and Paris. She returns to Istanbul, in search of freedom, happiness, and new love.

Set across the rambling orchards of a childhood in the Turkish provinces and the smoke-filled cafes of European capitals, Cold Nights of Childhood offers a sensual, unflinching portrayal of a woman's sexual encounters and psychological struggle, staging a clash between unbridled feminine desire and repressive, patriarchal society.

Originally published in 1980, six years before her death at 43, Cold Nights of Childhood cemented Tezer Özlü's status as one of Turkey's most beloved writers. A classic that deserves to stand alongside The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Cold Nights of Childhood is a powerfully vivid, disorienting, and bittersweet novel about the determined embrace of life in all its complexity and confusion, translated into English here for the first time by Maureen Freely, with an introduction by Aysegül Savas.

Author Biography

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.