The Applicant

Koca's debut novel centers on a young Turkish woman who finds herself at a crossroads, caught between the cogs of Germany's immigration system and her complicated family back home.

'An important and radical new literary voice' Elif Batuman

It's 2017 and Leyla, a leftwing Turkish twenty-something living in Berlin, is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland-themed hostel in order to stay afloat while awaiting a verdict on her visa status. Having failed her master's thesis and sued the German university over its decision, she is on the verge of losing her student visa and being forced to return to Istanbul, a city she thought she'd left behind for good.

As the clock winds down on her temporary visa, Leyla meets a right-wing Swedish tourist at a bar one night and-against her political convictions and better judgment-begins to fall in love. Will she choose to live a cookie-cutter life as the wife of a Volvo salesman, or just as unimaginable, return to Turkey to her mother and sister, codependent and enmeshed, the ghost of her father still haunting their lives?

Written in the wry, propulsive diary form of Rachel Khong's Goodbye, Vitamin and with the probing self-reflection of Sheila Heti's novels, Koca radically and courageously examines one's place in a deeply uncertain world, examining the bounds of state violence and self-destruction, of social dissociation and intense familial love. The Applicant is a stunning dissection of a liminal life lived between borders and identities.

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