17-year-old Dylan and 15-year-old Irem are infatuated with each other but face problems because of their familial background. So, what's new? Aren't there already innumerable boy-meets-girl stories of this kind on the market? It doesn't matter that a plot is as old as the hills, what an author makes of it matters. What the American author Alan Drew has made of it, is certainly worth a read, in fact it sends Romeo and Juliet to the back benches. Irem is the daughter of the Kurdish couple Sinan Basioglu and his wife Nilüfer, who have moved from the south-east of Turkey to a small town near Istanbul together with her and her younger brother Ismail. In the flat ...  Read the complete review

Sinan Basioglu and his wife are Kurdish refugees living in a suburb of Istanbul. In the apartment upstairs lives an American couple, both schoolteachers, with their teenage son, Dylan. Sinan, who feels like many Kurds that America backed the Turkish paramilitary raids on Kurdish villages, is outwardly polite to the Americans but he really doesn't want to have much to do with them. However, a tragic event causes Sinan to feel indebted to the American. A terrible earthquake strikes Istanbul, destroying the apartment building and the small store where Sinan earns his living. Sinan, his wife and their fifteen year old daughter, Irem escape unharmed but Ismail, their nine ...  Read the complete review