Serenade for Nadia A Novel

Named a Favorite Book of the Year by readers of the Boston Globe and a Best Book of the Year by PopMatters 

In this heartbreaking Turkish novel based on the real-life sinking of a refugee ship during World War II, an elderly professor leaves America to revisit the city where he last glimpsed his beloved wife.

Istanbul, 2001. Maya Duran is a single mother struggling to balance a demanding job at Istanbul University with the challenges of raising a teenage son. Her worries increase when she is tasked with looking after the enigmatic Maximilian Wagner, an elderly German-born Harvard professor visiting the city at the university’s invitation. Although he is distant at first, Maya gradually learns of the tragic circumstances that brought him to Istanbul sixty years before, and the dark realities that continue to haunt him.

Inspired by the 1942 Struma disaster, in which nearly 800 Jewish refugees perished after the ship carrying them to Palestine was torpedoed off the coast of Turkey, Serenade for Nadia is both a poignant love story and a gripping testament to the power of human connection in crisis.

Zülfü Livaneli is Turkey’s bestselling author, a celebrated composer and film director, and a political activist. Widely considered one of the most important Turkish cultural figures, he is known for his novels that interweave diverse social and historical backgrounds, figures, and incidents, including the critically acclaimed Bliss (winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award), Leyla’s House, My Brother’s Story, and The Eunuch of Constantinople, which have been translated into thirty-seven languages, won numerous international literary prizes, and been turned into movies, stage plays, and operas.

Brendan Freely was born in Princeton in 1959 and studied psychology at Yale University. His translations include Two Girls by Perihan Mağden, The Gaze by Elif Şafak, and Like a Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan.