Many and Many a Year Ago

Kemal's friend mysteriously disappears, leaving him a generous allowance and the use of his large house. He discovers that his new dwelling involves an inheritance of $1.3 million, and a Russian nobleman's missing son. Kemal embarks on a missing person case that will bring chaos and romance to his life. Clues lead him from Istanbul to Buenos Aires and eventually Boston. In Boston, Kemal visits the Edgar Allan Poe museum. There in the museum is a poster announcing the Nevar foundation's offer of $200,000 to the winner of a first novel competition. Kemal buys paper and pen. He has decided to enter the Nevar competition with a novel called 'Many and Many a Year Ago'.

Review: Music-loving aesthete and Turkish air-force pilot, Kemal enters a weird twilight existence in Istanbul after his plane crashes and a secret benefactor sets him up in a grand house in the haunted streets of old Balat. There follows an entertaining, somewhat absurd Hitchcockian comedy-mystery, rich in dropped names and arty jokes. It sends Kemal to the US on the trail of (of all McGuffins) Edgar Allan Poe. For readers here this cheeky romp, briskly translated by Clifford and Selhan Endres, may appeal most for its atmospheric glimpses of an inexhaustible city. Boyd Tonkin The Independent 27th November 2009 Praise for Songs My Mother Never Taught Me: 'A brilliantly edgy, witty thriller.' Maureen Freely 'Altun's prose has a dreamlike urgency; his novel is a major achievement.' John Ashbery