Stone and Shadow

“[An] expansive, dreamy, richly allusive novel…An enthralling, multidimensional epic from a leading figure on fiction’s world stage.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Following the enchanting and heartbreaking life of a gravestone cutter, Sönmez masterfully deploys the unique historical condition of modern Turkey to plumb the depths of identity and memory, asking what treasures are lost and what political conveniences are gained by the act of collective forgetting. With this book, he has eroded the boundaries of epochs, lands, languages, and even bodies, collapsing time into a beguiling and provocative coil. These freighted characters are a resounding belief in a hopeful if unnamable infinity.” —Kenan Orhan, author of I Am My Country: And Other Stories

“The longing and grace of Avdo, our gravestone cutter, as he navigates life through the complex and capricious political realities of twentieth-century Turkey make for an ambitious and thought-provoking novel. Pieces of different characters’ histories and desires span generations and governments to form a heartbreaking story.” —Marjan Kamali, author of The Stationery Shop and Together Tea

“This is storytelling with the precision of a poem and the scale of an epic. Stone and Shadow is a novel as multitudinous as Turkey, as wide and deep as life itself.” —Ayşe Papatya Bucak, author of The Trojan War Museum: and Other Stories