The Renovation by Kenan Orhan opens with builders who take five weeks, hang a tarp over the door so nobody can see in, refuse to answer their phones afterwards, and hand over a bathroom that is not a bathroom. It is a cell from Silivri Prison in Istanbul, four metres by four, with a steel toilet-and-sink unit, a swing-out seat bolted to the wall, and a guard walking past the bars.
When she rings the contractor to complain, he tells her he has emailed over the scans of her signature approving the materials and fixtures. When she says there is an actual prison where her bathroom should be, he says that seems highly unlikely to have happened in any case, and rings off.
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan is the funniest book on the Booker Prize 2026 longlist, and it is about a woman watching her father die of Alzheimer's. Both of those things are true at once and the novel never once loses its footing between them.
What Happens in The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
Dilara is a Turkish school psychologist living in Baronissi, a village outside Salerno. She has been in Italy since 2017, when she and her husband got her father out of Turkey: a political academic and minor novelist, purged from his professorship, blacklisted, beaten with the butt of a gun by a stranger on a path near his university.
He now lives in what used to be their dining room. He has had Alzheimer's for eight years. His vocabulary has narrowed to a single serviceable phrase, which he applies to everything: "It isn't correct."
Then the cell arrives. Her husband discovers it, decides the Turkish state has opened a route straight into the flat, packs a suitcase of underwear and flees to Milan. Dilara does not follow.
Instead she begins putting the room to use. Storage at first. Then a bolt-hole for the hours when her father is unbearable. Then a bed.
The Cell at the Centre of The Renovation by Kenan Orhan Gives Her Turkey Back
This is the novel's beautiful idea, and Orhan handles it with a very light touch. The cell provides. She thinks about coffee and a cup of it appears, foam exactly like Mandabatmaz in Beyoğlu. She thinks about marzipan from her favourite baker in Kuruçeşme and five rolls are on the table. Once, the whole room floods with the Bosporus, pike and sea bream and a fisherman's line and the peal of a ferry horn, and she stands there terrified and delighted with her toes in the pebbles.
None of it survives contact with Italy. Whatever she carries out fizzles away at the edge of her vision. She can have her country back for as long as she stays in the cell.
Then the prisoners start arriving, and the fantasy acquires teeth.
What Works
- The comedy is genuinely funny and never breaks character. A guard explains that he studied and worked hard his whole life in order to be able to say "I don't know anything", and here she is ruining it. A supervisor patiently explains the expansion programme: you have to make room for criminals before you can have criminals.
- The father. Sores that will not heal, a cane left in doorways, whiskey poured over a salad, the salt shaker filed in the medicine cabinet. Orhan writes eight years of decline without a single beat of sentiment. The scene in the optician's, where the old man begins pulling frames off the display one after another shouting his one remaining phrase, is horrifying and I could not look away.
- The other women. A journalist doing five years for saying on camera that Turkey is bad for women. A Kurdish grandmother arrested for not speaking Turkish, handcuffed to her granddaughter, who has been jailed alongside her to act as the interpreter.
- The passage on language. Dilara notices she has become a more buoyant person in Italian, because she learned all the words for happy and kind and beautiful and never bothered with the branching synonyms of bad. She asks her husband whether they need to make their vows again in a new language, in case the Italian versions of them do not love each other.
- The ending. I will not describe it, except to say The Renovation by Kenan Orhan earns it. It is one of the most quietly devastating final pages I have read, and it recasts the whole book as something much harder than the fable it appeared to be.
Where It Stumbles
- The political history is delivered in blocks. The Renovation by Kenan Orhan stops periodically to cover Gezi Park, the Gülenist split, the bombing years, the 2016 coup attempt, the purges. Much of it is superbly written, and for readers unfamiliar with the last fifteen years in Turkey it is necessary, but there are long stretches where the novel stops being a novel and becomes a briefing.
- The husband never becomes a person. He is a bundle of anxieties and a running joke about ulcers. He leaves in chapter three and the entire second half is shaped by his absence, and I could not tell you one thing about him beyond the panic.
- The Italian friends are broad. Lucia and Giovanni exist to be warm, loud and food-bearing. They border on caricature in a book that is scrupulous about everyone else.
- The cell's rules keep changing. Sometimes nothing can leave it. Sometimes photographs, meals and marzipan can. Dream logic is a fair defence, and it still slackens the tension when you stop being able to predict what the room can do.
The Forms of Imprisonment in The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
The judges said this book is about the forms imprisonment takes, from dementia to exile, and they were right, but the connection is sharper than that summary suggests.
Dilara's father is imprisoned in a mind that is emptying. Dilara is imprisoned in the role of his carer, which she performs alone, in a country where she cannot get work, with a bank balance running out. The women down the corridor are imprisoned by a state that has decided who counts. And Turkey itself, in the novel's most sustained argument, is imprisoned in a programme of renaming: the Bosporus Bridge becomes 15 July Martyrs Bridge, mosques and towers are "renovated" with jackhammers, and Istanbul was Konstantiniyye, was Constantinople, was Byzantion, was Lygos. A place, Dilara concludes, is the sum of its names.
The book is dedicated to caregivers, and it earns that. If you are looking after someone with dementia, the Alzheimer's Society has practical support, and this novel will either be exactly what you need or the last thing you can face.
A Word on Content Warnings
Alzheimer's rendered in unsparing physical detail, including incontinence and aggression. Caregiver rage, and one deliberate act of neglect that the narrator does not excuse. The 2023 earthquakes in southern Turkey. Political violence, arbitrary arrest, and an assault on an elderly man.
Who This Is For
Reach for The Renovation by Kenan Orhan if you like absurdity used seriously, if you have ever cared for a parent who no longer knows you, if you want to understand what the last decade in Turkey has felt like from inside a kitchen rather than a newspaper. Skip it if you need your magic realism to have consistent rules, or if you cannot currently be near a book about dementia.
At 164 pages it is short. It is not quick.
Read These Next
- I Am My Country and Other Stories by Kenan Orhan. His debut collection, a PEN/Bingham finalist, and the place to go for more of this voice at shorter range.
- There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. The other major contemporary novel of Turkish memory and water, broader and more romantic where Orhan is dry and close.
- The Trial by Franz Kafka. The obvious ancestor for the contractor who cannot be reached and the supervisor who explains that the prison must expand before there are prisoners.
- The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. Another novel in which things vanish from a country and from a mind at the same rate, and nobody in charge will admit it is happening.
- May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry. Also on this longlist, and the other book here about building a room to hold someone you have lost.
The Last Word on The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
There is a moment when Dilara realises the ideal prisoner is a person without memories: they get their meals, their medication, their hour of air, and they never have to remember rent. She works the idea over like an oyster making a pearl, and concludes that a minimum-security prison is a step above hospice care, and free.
That is the joke the whole novel is built on, and it stops being a joke somewhere around the fourth part.
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan is a first novel that grew out of a short story, and you can occasionally see the seams where the history has been packed in. What you cannot fault is the nerve of it, or the accuracy of the father, or the last page, which I have now read four times.
She asked for a waterfall shower with two heads and a marble bench. The country she left sent her something else instead.
