HALCYON

Every night, Professor Batu Aydemir counts backward from one hundred, just as his father taught him. Every night, he stops at ninety-one and wakes up in the Aegean: in a stone house with a fig tree in its courtyard, beside a woman who smiles at him as if she has always known him.

In Istanbul, he has a marriage that has gone quiet, a wife who drinks her coffee standing up, and a body that wakes up at three every morning. In Gümüşlük, he has a boat, the wind, and Ceyla.

One of these lives is a dream. Batu does not know which one. But the company that promises to give us back our nights, Halcyon, does.

Set in a near-future Turkey where insomnia has become as common as poverty, Halcyon is a psychological dystopia without violence, police, or villains. There is only a wristband, a speaker, and a voice that asks gently every morning: What did you dream? No one is forced to wear it. Everyone signs up voluntarily.

Stretching from Istanbul to the Aegean coast and on to Miami, this novel is about grief, marriage, memory, and how comfort quietly teaches us to consent.

Consent is the thing most easily forgotten by those who give it.

For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, and Emily St. John Mandel.