Alan Drew’s first novel opens with a loss. When 9-year-old Ismail lets go of his father’s hand as they board an Istanbul ferry, they are suddenly whirled apart in the mass of passengers. But this is a city where a father’s panic won’t go unnoticed, even in a surging crowd: within minutes, the word is out and Ismail’s father, Sinan, sees the boy floating back to him, lofted from one man to the next like “a king raised high above the people.”

GARDENS OF WATER

By Alan Drew.

Istanbul is the city where East meets West across the Bosporus, dividing Europe from Asia. It’s also a place where the Muslim world intersects with Christianity or, if you prefer, where an agrarian and traditional society is challenged by modernity. Istanbul itself — from its nightclubs to its mosques — encapsulates the tensions of the globalized community. Figuratively and literally, Istanbul stands on a fault line.
“Gardens of Water” records the seismic shocks that reverberate through the lives of two families in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake that struck western Turkey in 1999. The next time Sinan sees his son floating, the boy is on a bed sailing through the collapsing wall of their apartment building, turned into a jumble of broken concrete by the earthquake. Trapped in the rubble, Ismail survives — but only thanks to an American woman, pinned alongside him, who dies while feeding him water from a broken spigot.
Refugees from the vicious war waged between the Turkish Army and Kurdish guerrillas in the southeastern provinces, Sinan and his wife are villagers who have fled to a seemingly safer life on the outskirts of the city. The world of cosmopolitan Istanbul is not theirs; its people are not their people. In such difficult circumstances, they have raised their beloved son; but they also have a 15-year-old daughter, Irem, who suffers from her parents’ obvious preference for Ismail. Imprisoned by the expectations of her traditionalist family, she is fascinated by the American teachers who live in the apartment upstairs — and in particular by their slinky teenage son, Dylan, who defies local convention in ways Irem finds both dangerous and mesmerizing.

MY OPINIONS

• "Compelling... a story of pain followed by redemption.... a strong first novel which speaks of its author's interest in people and sure footed instinct in storytelling".
• A novel in which disastrous aftershocks number all the way through a tragic denouement. Sensitive on thought-proveking."Garden Of The Water" is set in a perfectly realized Istanbul, a city where traditional and mordemity grind together like the fragments of a collapsing building.
• Tightly focused novel which balances the sweetness of youth and the brooding anxieties of parenthood with a robust understanding of the Muslims- Western one outer.
• An important novel, specially in today's global world... " Garden Of The Water" is a real triump, and introduces an exciting new writer one voice.