Madonna in a Fur Coat

Raif Efendi lives a quiet, ordinary life in Ankara, almost invisible to those around him. The notebook he leaves to a young colleague before his death reveals the storm this silent man kept inside.

In it, he tells of his love for Maria Puder, a painter he met in Berlin as a young man, and how that love transformed him. With its frame narrative, the novel carries the reader between two different times.

It is one of the most powerful Turkish novels ever written about loneliness, the failure to connect and withdrawing into one's inner world.