Cold Nights of Childhood

Childhood is not only the beginning of life, but something we continually turn back towards, perhaps we never get out of its grasp. The narrator of Cold Nights of Childhood grows up in a rapidly changing Turkey, where Stalin's death is celebrated and there is widespread support for America. Following the military coup of 1960, the atmosphere is nationalist, patriarchal, technocratic. A misfit at school and in her family home, she begins to hope that marriage could provide her a way out, though this relationship soon ends in disaster. In search of freedom, new love and happiness, she escapes to Berlin for a little while, but on her return is stuck down a terrible, overpowering depression. Trapped in a psychiatry clinic for five years, she is subjected to electroshock therapy and inhumane treatment by the staff. After finally being released to the care of her friends and family, she makes her first steps in a tentative, halting journey towards recovery. In her unique, unstructured style, Tezer Özlü explores the extremity of one woman's inner life and the painful pleasures of memory when the outer world is repressive and unyielding. Cold Nights of Childhood is a powerfully vivid, disorienting and bittersweet novel about the determined embrace of life in all its complexity and confusion. Translated into English for the first time by Maureen Freely, this novel is a classic that deserves to stand alongside The Bell Jar and Good Morning, Midnight.