BLOOD MEMORY

BLOOD MEMORY

A historian struck on the head in an Istanbul bazaar begins to see the lives of his ancestors - twenty-one generations of them, stretching back to a slaughter in a dry Anatolian streambed in 1233. A literary novel of memory, ancestry, and what a family carries when the archives have refused it.

When Tarık Çelik is struck by a falling brass scale in the Egyptian Bazaar, he sees a hillside - dry, pale, Anatolian - where three men are being executed by Arab soldiers. One of them, a boy no older than eighteen, looks up across eight centuries and says, in Turkish: Remember us.

Then Tarık is back on the stone floor of the bazaar, and a paramedic is telling him to stay awake, and his life has, without his consent, been divided into before and after.

The visions do not stop. Night by night, he is delivered into the ordinary Tuesdays of ancestors he never knew existed - a grain-buyer in a ninth-century marketplace, a farmer who bribes a tax official and cannot look at his wife afterward, a man who sits through the winter night with a dying Greek neighbour he had spent thirty years hating over a ditch. Twenty-one generations of small survivals, all leading back to a name and a date: Kaplan, born 1212, throat cut 1233, in a killing no chronicle bothered to record.

But the visions do not only move backward. One afternoon, on the floor of his apartment in Balat, Tarık sees a hospital corridor three months in the future. A woman comes through a door. He knows her face. He has known it for three years.

Blood Memory is a novel about the specific muscular decision, made by an eighteen-year-old boy in the dusk of the day his father was killed, to get up the next morning and continue - and about what that decision, remade in every generation, means for the descendant it eventually arrives in. Set in contemporary Istanbul and threaded through eight hundred years of Anatolian ground, it is a novel about neuroscience and mysticism, about the woman a man loves for three years without daring to say so, about the mothers who carried what the archives refused to record, and about what happens when love and history and blood arrive, at long last, at the same moment.

A literary novel of ancestral memory, contemporary Istanbul, and the specific kind of continuing that becomes, over eight hundred years, its own kind of prayer. Will appeal to readers of Elif Shafak, Anthony Doerr, and Georgi Gospodinov.

A historian struck on the head in an Istanbul bazaar begins to see the lives of twenty-one generations of ancestors - leading back to a killing in a dry Anatolian streambed in 1233, and forward to a hospital corridor three months from now where the woman he has loved for three years is waiting. A literary novel of memory, ancestry, and what a family carries when the archives have refused it.