Endgame

Ahmet Altan

Endgame by Ahmet Altan (Paperback ISBN 9781782112617) book cover

Available as Paperback

A dark, seductive and existential page-turner from one of Turkey’s bestselling and most significant writers

A man retires to a sun-baked Turkish town for a quiet life. What he finds is a world of suspicion, paranoia and violence. In a community of shady local officials, corrupt businessmen and a crooked police force, our narrator’s life spins into chaos and criminality.

The town makes a murderer of him. The question is, who did he kill?


“If Steinbeck had written The Godfather, it might have read like this”
Dbc Pierre

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“A deeply compelling and immersive narrative about love, desire, loneliness and landscape. Ahmet Altan is one of the foremost voices in Turkish literature and has much to say to the world”
Elif Shafak

“An impassioned, captivating dance, a waltz between death and desire that does not release you for even a single moment”
Philippe Sands

Endgame is a complex and immensely readable book - insightful, disturbing, irritating and riveting”
Andrea Wulf

“Extraordinary, delicious, wise, I admire Ahmet Altan’s novels”
linn Ullman


Ahmet Altan

Ahmet Altan is one of Turkey’s most significant authors and journalists. His first novel, Four Seasons of Autumn, published when he was 27, won the Grand Award of the Akademi Publishing House. His second, Trace on the Water, was banned for obscenity. Dangerous Tales, 1996, became a bestseller and sold more than 200,000 copies. His novels have been translated into many languages.

In 2016, Ahmet and his brother Mehmet were arrested as part of a wave of arrests of journalists and writers following the coup attempt in Turkey. In 2018, they were sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for their alleged involvement in the coup. The verdict has been widely condemned by human rights groups and journalists worldwide.

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 (published by Penguin in the US).