It is astonishing how much of a difference the sun makes. In how I perceive the world — the past and the future. In how I wake up and move through the day. In how the faded green high school sitting in the empty land across from our place changes color, or the gray mosque I pass by on my morning walks — they just look different. A new shade of hope.
When I woke up this morning, I felt the urge to write in this space, something I haven’t done for a long time. It saddens me sometimes how writing on my blog can be readily sacrificed for a conference paper, an article, or an essay to be published elsewhere. I can’t easily put what I write here on my CV. Well, I can and I do, but is it considered “credible”? It should be, but it isn’t. I have been writing a ton, though, and enjoying every second of it. And to me, that’s all that matters.
Lately, I’ve been working on an article about Elif Shafak’s latest novel There are Rivers in the Sky (2024), where I bring together postcolonial, ecocritical, and gender discourses to analyze the trajectory of one of its characters, Zaleekhah. The paper is in the hands of the reviewers now, and I can’t wait to see what else will be written on this amazing novel. If you haven’t read it already, you must absolutely put it on your list — especially if you’re interested in texts that explore the diasporic condition, history, water, gender, and how all of these elements intersect in the 21st century.
The novel’s multiple characters are connected across centuries and distant geographies through two parallel strains: the tablets of The Epic of Gilgamesh, and drops of water. The narrative follows Ashurbanipal, the Neo-Assyrian king; Arthur Smith in the 19th century when the Industrial Revolution is at its peak — a character heavily based on George Smith, the British Assyriologist who was the first to rediscover the Mesopotamian tablet that tells the story of Utnapishtim and a flood strikingly similar to Noah’s Ark; Zaleekhah, a hydrologist living in London in 2018 who believes that “water retains memory”; and Narin, a young Yazidi girl in modern-day Eastern Turkey and Iraq who is eventually captured by ISIS. The way Shafak threads the connections among all these characters is pure art. What you have is a novel whose pages you cannot stop turning — a deeply meaningful story about Mesopotamia, London, rivers, and the earth. It is a stark look at how vulnerable humans and more-than-humans fall through the cracks of a neoliberal capitalist system that devalues anything and everything that cannot be turned into revenue.
Reading Shafak’s novel coincided with the news surrounding a high-profile plagiarism case against her in Turkey. Sued in 2021, a civil court ultimately ruled against her in early 2024. The case itself was/has been deeply defined by competing ideologies; I found that concerns regarding actual literary merit were relegated to the periphery. So, I set out to examine the details of this curious case. You can read my full analysis in my essay, “Judging the Author, Not the Book: Exploring the Discourse of the Shafak Plagiarism Case,” published in Asymptote Journal. I have several other exciting projects brewing that are keeping me inspired, writing, and on task.
In the meantime, I have read some amazing novels that, like Shafak’s, bring to the fore the interconnectedness of war, violence, gender, and the environment in the 21st century.
Tahmima Anam’s latest novel, Uprising: A Novel (2026), published this month, is a story of resistance that will resonate with us all in this current era of protests. The narrative focuses on Kusum, a young Bangladeshi woman sold into slavery and forced into sex work on an island filled with enslaved women. They are held captive by “Amma,” “the mother of our mothers,” who — as the children of the workers tell us — “had brought our mothers to the island, just as she was brought long ago.” When we are introduced to the floating brothel, Amma’s business is in distress. The economy in the country is gutting her profits, a crisis severely exacerbated by environmental degradation and constant monsoons. Kusum is forced into the fold to lure the men back, but she defies Amma’s expectations — literally. She resists, teaches the children who grew up on the island how to read and write, and sparks an uprising.
The island in the story is based on the real island of Banishanta, where sex workers increasingly battle rising waters and a patriarchal system that offers them no escape. The novel addresses a reality where both women and the environment are marginalized — viewed as passive and available for exploitation. More importantly, it does an amazing job of challenging this narrative. Uprising: A Novel is certainly a difficult read, but the imaginative elements that Anam brings into the narrative make it easier to get through. Kusum is a force, and we are right there with her on the island, rooting for her and hearing her story.
From Bangladesh to Estonia, the settings and faces change, but the core anxieties of the twenty-first century remain the same. Carolina Pihelgas’s English-language debut, The Cut Line (2024; 2026) translated from the Estonian by Darcy Hurford, centers on Liine, a woman in her thirties escaping a degrading fourteen-year relationship for the quiet of a family cottage in Tsoriksoo, Estonia. She takes solace in nature and botanical gardens, but the world is on fire –literally and figuratively–, reflecting a collective precarity we all recognize.
Written as a letter, or a note, addressed to her ex-boyfriend, Tarmo, the narrative shifts beautifully as the “you” eventually becomes herself towards the end of the novel. The garden she keeps, alongside the botanical gardens and parks she revisits, all help her untangle her past, her complicated relationship with her parents, and her broader family history. Nature itself offers promise: “The cuckoos are calling, the bees buzzing, the birch leaves fluttering in the wind like a hope.”
Pihelgas brilliantly illustrates how a woman’s well-being is intimately linked to political and ecological stability; Liine’s reclamation of the neglected garden is a powerful metaphor for her recovery from domestic trauma. Yet her refuge — the farmhouse specifically, and nature more broadly — is at risk as the Anthropocene marches forward in tandem with a nearby NATO military base. The drastic drought affecting the forests and plants, coupled with the echoing explosions from military drills, showcases a looming ecological and military collapse. In the end, Pihelgas captures the complex reality of a woman striving to find her footing amid environmental decay and military escalation.
There is a lot going on in Liine’s life, and again, most of her concerns, both internal and external, are ones we can deeply resonate with. Yet despite it all, in the midst of the chaos, she is on a path toward a better sense of self. Finding a stack of letters belonging to her great-aunt Elvi allows her to dive deeply into her family’s past. She spends her days outside in nature, “looking at plants” and “preferring wildness and the crazy bustle of my garden” over the city. She spends less time on Instagram and begins visiting the small library in town, finding herself reading again after a long, long time.
Liine’s process of anchoring herself in the present moment brings me right back to how I started this post. I truly had no idea why my subconscious wanted to write about the sun and how it makes me feel this morning. But it is this exact desire — the need to be present and shed the performative layers of life, social media, and writing just to appease an institution or build a CV — that drew me to the sun. It is that warmth that has lately brought me back to my own reality.
Tuning into the present moment is an idea often confined to psychology and mindfulness; some find it a bit “woo-woo,” while others cite studies proving its necessity if we are to survive the harsh realities of our distinct societies. I, too, sometimes refrain from talking about it, lest I sound unrealistic. But novels like The Cut Line remind me that I am not alone in trying to return to the present — to observe the birds and the waves, and the way the buildings are dressed completely differently whether under the sun, or the rain, or the snow.
This focus on the present moment reminds me of a time I was teaching Modernism and Eileen Chang’s short story “Sealed Off” in my large amphitheater class. Set in 1940s Shanghai during the Japanese occupation, the story covers a fleeting love affair when a tram car comes to a full stop during an air raid. Chang, as expected, doesn’t focus on the political instability outside the tram — the people probably frantically running as the sirens go off, or the eerie silence falling over the otherwise bustling streets of wartime Shanghai. Instead, she zooms in on the various people trapped inside this metal vehicle. Time slows down, freezing the exact moment the story takes place.
As I was explaining to the lecture hall how Chang critiques the way “modern” life breeds disconnection and human alienation, one of my students raised his hand and cleverly asked, “What is the solution then? What solution does she offer?” I had to pause for a second. Modernists, as we know, rarely offer solutions; their purpose is to reveal, mirror, and reflect — I’m thinking here particularly of writers like Jean Rhys, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. It was, of course, a perfect teaching moment about the nature of Modernism, but I loved my student’s question because he was asking for something deeper. A cure for the political, social, and financial chaos we navigate daily, especially here in Turkey. A solution to the disconnection we feel from other humans, driven partly by social media, partly by a fast-changing political agenda that leaves us perpetually overwhelmed, and partly by the sheer overstimulation of traffic and overpopulation in a city like Istanbul.
So, what is the antidote?
While modernists were primarily interested in documenting the emerging patterns of despair and hopelessness brought on by modern industrial life, twenty-first-century literature has a lot more to offer when it comes to solutions for moving through this world with a sense of self, peace, and connection (even if that isn’t its primary task). Looking closely at the novels I’ve mentioned here — Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky, Anam’s Uprising, and Pihelgas’s The Cut Line — shows us that there can be hope in the midst of chaos and instability. In these pages, resistance, survival, and healing happen when characters remain acutely aware of the world around them but refuse to be distracted by what the system demands of them. Through high stakes and heavy obstacles, they fight to remain passionate, do their best to care, and strive to inhabit the present moment in the truest sense of the word.
“Distraction” is the key word for me here. The more these characters find space to turn inward, whether by tending to a neglected garden, going to a local library to read, feeling the wind on their face while biking, moving to a houseboat, or sparking a rebellion on an island that traps women, the less distracted they become from their own senses, feelings, and thoughts.
Whether it is protesting in solidarity, sitting on the grass to enjoy the sun, watching a play, exploring an art exhibit, listening to the waves, or truly listening to a friend, hearing them out and catching every word, it is all an antidote to the disconnection that modern life has perpetuated since the 1910s. Even listening to music on the way to a demanding job is a quiet rebellion. True presence can be powerful, asking us to pause, observe, think, and feel; it is a reminder that hope isn’t found in the frantic pace of the system, but in the undistracted reality of the spaces we occupy right now.
So, I know that I am not alone in this; our perception of the world fundamentally shifts the moment we choose to be truly present. We are human, after all. If we don’t have hope, if we lack these shifts in perspective, and if we strip away the books, the music, the art, and the camaraderie that sustain us, what do we really have left?
Have you read any of the novels I’ve mentioned here, and if so, what did you think? Or do you have any book recommendations that share this same spirit with Anam’s, Shafak’s, or Pihelgas’s work?