Born in 1967. Resides in Istanbul. Practicing psychiatrist since 1997. On the Shore of an Orange Past is his first novel.

Praise

I generally have a distaste for novels about minorities and the Anatolian Greeks, because they are always laden with this sense of ‘they never understood us’. Melih Özeren’s On the Shore of an Orange Past, however, is different. Though I approached the book with prejudice, what I encountered while reading it had a powerful emotional effect upon me. In short, I loved this novel.

This is a book which, while seeking to understand the human experience, strives to convey the traumatic effects of discrimination. However, unlike other books of its type, it makes no recourse to ethnic defense mechanisms, or the need to implicitly disparage ‘the other’.

When you read this book, you’ll become acquainted with a period we might now consider ‘the past’, the former residents of Istanbul, and very real, very human protagonists who have lived in our midst, and seeing how each of these people, having grown old far from their homeland, has become a laborer of memory, and, ultimately, like the author, you too will grow to love them.

Herkül Millas, Ege University