highlight 2022 : Fatma Aydemir’s epic family novel JINNS

Politikens Forlag in Denmark acquired the Danish rights to Fatma Aydemir’s new novel JINNS (Hanser 2022) before its publication in Germany, now we received a first offer for the Finnish rights to it and so many things are happening for JINNS all at once it seems!

• rights sold to Denmark (Politikens), the Netherlands (Signatuur), English world (Wisconsin UP), Poland (Cyranka), Italy (Fazi), France (under negotiation), Arabic (under negotiation), Finland (offer received)
• shortlisted for the German Book Award 2022
• by the author of ELBOW (Hanser 2017)
• raving press in Germany

»The novel tells the story of that period from the inside – from within the migrant families’ homes that were torched by their German neighbours. Those are the big political questions the novel deals with, while Aydemir conveys individual perspective with her detailed descriptions of gesture. But Djinns is also a classic family story about secrets and unspoken truths. There is more to it than meets the eye, which is why it’s so hard to put down« Tobias Rüther, Frankfurter Sonntagszeitung

»The multitude of voices in the novel is as extraordinary as the nonchalance with which Aydemir weaves current discourses on origin, gender and identity into the story. She plays brilliantly with leitmotifs, and is a master of easy dialogue and dramatic structure. With Djinns, she has created a narrative voice that tackles a topical subject while retaining the spirit of an epic.« Meike Feßmann, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»A stunningly intense and multi-layered novel – a brilliant family epic.« Stern

»Aydemir has a gift for empathising with almost every single one of her characters – it’s hard to tear yourself away.« SPIEGEL Bestseller supplement

»The images and situations that Aydemir conjures up are almost uncannily detailed. Each terse line of dialogue, every unrelenting emotion, every pop culture reference – in short, every single word is apposite. She mercilessly takes the dominant society’s racism to task, a racism as evident today as it was in the 1990s – when the story is set – while also systematically dissecting the family’s own repressive mechanisms.« Maryam Aras, Die Presse

Hüseyin has spent the past thirty years working in Germany, and now his biggest dream has finally come true: he’s bought his very own flat in Istanbul – but he promptly dies of a heart attack on the day he moves in. His family in Germany travel to Turkey for the funeral. Fatma Aydemir’s epic social novel tells the stories of six characters who could not be more different from each other, and yet all happen to be related – and of their insatiable desire to be understood.

If every family is nothing more than a tapestry of stories, what do the holes in them mean? Do we need them because we can’t face up to the whole truth? Or will they end up bringing everything crashing down? Djinns asks these questions with power and beauty, casting its gaze deep into the history of the past decades and far ahead into the future. The six unforgettable protagonists of this novel all have their own baggage: secrets, desires, wounds. And yet one thing unites them all: this feeling they get in Hüseyin’s flat that someone is watching them.

Rights to the images are with (c) Hanser Verlag.