BAKLAVAS AND BALACLAVAS

Orhan Demir has spent most of his life believing that work is what keeps a man upright. Then, after sixteen years at the same factory, he is told he is no longer needed.

At first, there are applications, appointments, careful calculations and the small humiliations of unemployment.

Then there is baklava.

One piece brings back memories of his mother, of childhood, and of a life in which he understood who he was. Soon, the pastry becomes more than comfort. It becomes ritual. Then craving. Then something Orhan begins making excuses to protect.

When money grows tight, those excuses take him somewhere he never imagined he would go.

The crimes that follow are strange enough to make strangers laugh. The people caught inside them are not laughing.

What begins as the story of an ordinary man losing his footing becomes something darker: a story about shame, hunger, dignity and the dangerous ways people justify what they want. And when Orhan finally understands the harm he has caused, he discovers that remorse is not the same as repair.

Set in Berlin and moving between dark humour, crime and deeply human drama, Baklavas and Balaclavas is a novel about the things we use to comfort ourselves, the lines we cross when comfort becomes need, and the difficult work of living after we have become someone we never intended to be.

Some mistakes can be forgiven. Others can only be answered by what we do next.