Wûf

Told through the voice of a canine narrator, Wûf is a love story set in a Kurdish town during the Turkish-Kurdish civil war. The novel follows Mikasa, a street dog who falls in love with Melsa, a guard dog at the headquarters of the Kurdish political party. At the moment the two are about to consummate their love, they find themselves cruelly separated by Turquoise, a Kurdish turncoat who does the state’s dirty work. Mikasa ends up at a military facility where he is trained to detect landmines. When Turquoise takes command of the outpost where Mikasa’s stationed, Mikasa sets his sights on revenge at any cost.

Having taken the Turkish literary world by storm, Kemal Varol’s Wûf offers an unflinching account of one of the Middle East’s most intractable conflicts as it tackles universal themes of love and loss with humor and pathos. Translated by PEN/Heim Award winner Dayla Rogers, the novel renders in English a one-of-a-kind love story with a narrator its readers won’t soon forget.