The City in Crimson Cloak

Translated by Amy Spangler. Özgür, having deserted her past and secluded herself from the outer world, is poor and on the verge of a mental breakdown. She has a single weapon left in the all-out war she has declared against Rio de Janeiro: to write the city, which has robbed her of everything. As we read the pieces of Özgür's unfinished novel, The City in Crimson Cloak, with its autobiographical protagonist named, for the time being, only as Ö., we begin to put together the fragments of Özgür's story.

One of Turkey's most challenging authors, Asli Erdogan has been a critical success both in Turkey and Europe. A former physicist who abandoned her scientific career for a literary one, Erdogan's first book, the novel The Shell Man was published in 1994. Erdogan's second novel, The City in Crimson Cloak, established her as a writer of formidable literary merit, gathering accolades abroad.

From 1998 to 2000, Erdogan, a human rights activist and former Turkish representative of PEN's Writers in Prison Committee, wrote a column for the Turkish newspaper Radikal entitled "The Others." Her articles were later collected and published as the book When a Journey Ends.