Product Description
Set in the mountains of Anatolia, this story of love, pursuit and vengeance recounts the efforts of Memed, a poor orphan, to obtain justice against a tyrant, even if it means taking to banditry to achieve his ends. The author also wrote "The Wind from the Plain" and "To Crush the Serpent".
Review
"A beautiful novel in the old, glorious tradition of heroic storytelling." * Scotsman * "'A masterpiece'." * New Statesman * "'A tale that assumes epic proportions and gathers speed to rush to a spectacular climax'." * Daily Telegraph * "It has that insiders feelings for man, the oppressed, labouring animal ... you might find in Tolstoy, Hardy or Silone. The author never loses his freshness, an ability to pick on details as though see for the first time." * Guardian * "Yasham Kemal achieves the Russian quality - an intimacy of detail which makes his etching indelible, more selected, and therefore more obvious than life ... the book is a small, sharp, moving epic of Turkish soil" * Sunday Telegraph *
From the Back Cover
"Yashar Kemal is one of those writers who is content with the patch of earth allotted by birth. As in the case of Faulkner, Akhmatova, or even Joyce, all the events described circle around the site of an early injury. These writers evoke landscapes containing people who, however lost they may be in their marginal existences, fix their gaze upon the center of the world and take up residence there. [Kemal is driven to] write against the age and to tell those stories that have not been elevated to the status of affairs of state because they deal with people who never sat on high, who did not dominate but rather were themselves dominated." —Günter Grass
About the Author
Yashar Kemal (1923 2015) was born on the cotton-growing plains of Chukurova, which feature in his
The Wind from the Plain trilogy. His championship of poor peasants lost him a succession of jobs, but he was eventually able to buy a typewriter and set himself up as a public letter-writer in the small town of Kadirli. After a spell as a journalist, he published a volume of short stories in 1952, and then, in 1955, his first novel
Memed, My Hawk won the Varlik Prize for best novel of the year. His work went on to win countless prizes from all over the world, and was translated into several languages. Kemal was a member of the Central Committee of the banned Workers' Party, and in 1971 he was held in prison for 26 days before being released without charge. Subsequently, he was placed on trial for action in support of Kurdish dissidents. Among the many international prizes and honours he received in recognition of his gifts as a writer and his courageous fight for human rights, are the French Légion d'Honneur and the Prix duMeilleur Livre Etranger, as well as being nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kemal was Turkey's most influential living writer and, in the words of John Berger, "one of the modern world's great storytellers".