A strange, looping, village-haunted novel from one of Turkey’s major contemporary writers.

In a remote Anatolian village, people begin to disappear: a barber, a girl, a child, a presence, a certainty. The authorities search, rumours breed, reality thins, and the village becomes less a stable place than a system of echoes, absences and half-explanations.

Toptaş writes in that borderland between fable, philosophical mystery and rural uncanny: Kafka by way of oral storytelling, with something of Borges, Calvino and Márquez in the way the world keeps folding back on itself. It is a novel about disappearance, but also about narration itself — who gets remembered, who gets swallowed by a story, and what remains when a community can no longer tell the difference between fact, dream, myth and fear.

Bloomsbury hardback. First published in Turkey as Gölgesizler in 1995; first published in Great Britain in this English translation in 2017. Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely and John Angliss. Good second-hand condition, with visible edge/corner wear and some creasing/handling to the cover.