Journey to the Edge of Life

Tezer Özlü (1943–1986) claimed her place in Turkish letters by breaking every rule imposed on her. Though she was misunderstood by most throughout her short life, her writings have gone on to inspire a new generation of feminist writers and readers. Her English-language debut, Cold Nights of Childhood won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award. Journey to the End of Life is her second novel to be translated into English. Maureen Freely is a writer, translator and Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies and a member of English PEN. She is the author of six novels, three works of non-fiction and is the translator of five books by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Praise for Journey to the Edge of Life:"Gorgeous... Özlü’s discursive narrative finds great clarity and beauty."—Publishers Weekly“A striking composite of literary biography, criticism, and autobiography that surely counts as one of [Özlü’s] best works . . . Despite the incessant presence of death and loss, Özlü’s books remain invigorating and bracing.”—Kaya Genç, The Nation"Reading Özlü becomes meditative, almost trance-like...Özlü has written through her ghosts and memories and past readings, emerging with renewed capacity for life and its shapeless wanderings."—The Los Angeles Review of Books“Slippery, frantic, darkly lyrical — seductive. In her dreamlike parade of European cities, abandoned lovers, brooding train trips and existential musings on the desire for total freedom, Özlü’s narrator swerves between self-doubt, self-assertion and self-annihilation."—The Berliner"Where many conventional novels offer resolution and catharsis, hers require a tolerance for ambiguity and incompleteness... Özlü's work reflects the mind in all its disorder and intensity, resisting easy meaning."—Michigan Quarterly Review“[Journey to the Edge of Life] feels as though it were crafted in a series of concentric circles, each opening into the next as the reader moves further into the story.”—Cleaver Magazine"Özlü evokes the writing of Plath and Kerouac in this novel of a Turkish woman's travels across central and eastern Europe in rebellion against the strictures of society... Utterly unique!"—Jennifer Ray, Powell's Books (Portland, OR)Praise for Cold Nights of Childhood:“A profoundly moving account of desperation, exhilaration, and endurance.”—Kirkus Reviews“In Özlü’s posthumous English-language debut, a young woman describes her 1950s childhood and her treatment for mental illness in her 20s. 'All I ever wanted was to be free to think and act beyond the tedious limits set by the petit bourgeoisie,' says the narrator... The edition includes a magnificent introduction from Ayşegül Savaş, who puts Özlü (1943–1986) in a lineage with Italo Svevo and Franz Kafka and praises her frank approach to sexuality as 'neither sensational nor metaphorical.'”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review“It’s uncanny how clearly Özlü speaks of a different time yet, simultaneously, of this moment.”—The Financial Times“While these facts of Özlü’s life story overlap with the events of Cold Nights, the interest of the book is not so much its autobiographical mirror but the way that life is endowed with an electric mutability. Madness, after all, disrupts the temporal narrative. Here, time is broken and reshuffled through the sharp-edge of consciousness. The self is peeled away layer by layer to arrive at its core: 'Then slowly, very slowly, I begin to remember. Myself. This is me. I am twenty-five years old. I am a woman. I am living through the second part of the madness that begins with joy. I have suffered the anguish of lethargy.'”—Ayşegül Savaş, author of White on White