Kürk Mantolu Madonna

A quiet Turkish clerk, dismissed by everyone around him as having no inner life, turns out to have had one enormous love affair in 1920s Berlin. The frame is the point: the novel insists that the least remarkable person in the room is not what he looks like.

Sabahattin Ali was killed at the Bulgarian border in 1948, and the book went largely unread for decades before becoming, improbably, one of the best-selling novels in Turkey.