An unnamed author is consumed by a small-town conspiracy in this existential noir by the award-winning Turkish author of Like a Sword Wound.

Named one of Washington Post's 50 Notable Books of 2017

In Endgame, award-winning author and Turkish political dissident Ahmet Altan has crafted an enigmatic literary noir exploring the ways corruption has overtaken contemporary Turkish life. With a dreamlike logic reminiscent of Paul Auster and Graham Greene, it tells the story of an unnamed man who arrives in a small town only to find himself involved in a mystery with existential implications (The Washington Post).
The protagonist, a womanizing writer who lived his entire life in the city, retires to a sunbaked Turkish village to enjoy the quiet. Instead, he encounters a world of suspicion, paranoia, and violence. The town's mayor is both his only ally and his greatest nemesis; his lover shares an ambiguous past with the mayor; the locals seem hell-bent on turning him into a murderer; and, he is initiated into the town's biggest secret only to discover this knowledge will become a weapon used against him. All the while, Altan's appealingly untrustworthy narrator transports the reader into a world of lust, ambition, small-town politics, and death.

"Endgame is a mystery adventure of such intimately written humanity that it transcends genre, time, and place. If Steinbeck had written The Godfather it might have read like this."--DBC Pierre, Man Booker Prize-winning author of Vernon God Little