UPROOTED

A man and woman flee Istanbul on a desperate trek to freedom in this novel.

As the narrative commences, Kemal Yilmaz, a former agent in Turkey’s Central Intelligence agency who’s enduring a snowstorm in Istanbul, is a worried man. His lover, Nadiye, is missing, presumably entangled in the chaos following the military coup that’s convulsed the country and left a cabal of generals in control. And that group’s ascendancy has made Kemal and all of his ex-colleagues hunted fugitives, ensnared in a deadly Catch-22. They were officially ordered to resign, knowing if they obeyed they could be arrested for treason. If they refused, they could be detained for disobeying the order. Caught in this same bind is Nadiye’s sister, Shirin, who, as the renowned exotic dancer Nejla Ateş, is “a femme fatale no one in Turkey could match.” Former agents like Kemal and Shirin are now “ilgisiz,” irrelevant. To make matters worse, Shirin has been coerced into one more mission: to use her feminine wiles on two Russian military officers in order to learn their plans regarding Turkey. Her recruiter is a man named Hakan Chatli, a menacing political hit man who’s been known to quote Turkish poetry while killing his victims. Though Kemal and Shirin had been mere acquaintances and political opposites, they agree to follow a mad, improvised plan to flee Turkey and head overland all the way east to Sinjiang province in China, where he has family. Shirin is skeptical: They have forged documentation, no help, and Afghanistan is under Soviet rule after an invasion. In addition, Pakistan’s prime minister has just been executed. And there’s the added threat of Hakan personally hunting Shirin down, no matter how far from Turkey she flees.

From these simple elements—a country suffering turmoil; two ex-agents making a run for a new life—Wittenborn crafts a surprisingly powerful story. All of the book’s many characters—particularly Kemal and Shirin—are drawn with minimal brush strokes and a complete lack of sentimentality. At one point, onboard a vessel in the Black Sea, Shirin watches the lights of little villages on shore and is briefly tempted. “I wonder what it’s like to live there,” she muses. “A nice simple life. No complications”—to which Kemal immediately responds: “And, no supermarkets, no phones, no plumbing….We’re creatures of the city.” Their travels are leanly but effectively described, as are the many supporting characters they meet along the way (especially a man named Rustam they encounter in Iran). The author draws out the tension of Shirin’s certainty that Hakan is after her but doesn’t overdo it. Likewise, the unending international conflicts the pair faces, where “every day is a question mark,” are skillfully portrayed—the political and ethnic strife they encounter are described with a knowing economy. The little details of daily existence, the food, the drink, the rhythms, are vividly brought to life, from the wonderfully realized Istanbul in winter to the bazaars and blasted cityscapes of the war-torn countries that Kemal and Shirin must cross in order to reach their destination. And the narrative’s unexpected resolution of its earliest plot question—What happened to Kemal’s lover, Nadiye?—is deftly done.

An unsparing and richly atmospheric international thriller.