Cold Nights of Childhood

A piercing autobiographical novel by the cult Turkish writer Tezer Ozlu.

In a country swept up in political upheavals, Tezer Ozlu creates a book that radically changes the direction of one’s gaze—it refuses to submit to the external crisis, focusing instead on her own inner war. "Cold Nights of Childhood" is her autobiographical novel of madness, where time breaks and reality crumbles into painful fragments. Ozlu lays bare her struggle with a disorder and records the horrifying experience of psychiatric clinics. The heroine moves between Istanbul, Berlin, and hospital wards, but the settings dissolve into one another: everything turns into a single, oppressive space. This bold, poetic, and uncompromising book about self-definition still remains one of the most honest studies of inner freedom in Turkish literature of the twentieth century.