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. 'A virtuosic, visceral meditation on borders, in-betweenness, and identity, and a testament to why we read in the first place: to laugh, to be devastated. With exhilarating and eviscerating wit, Nazli Koca is a daring and provocative prose stylist with heart' Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace'An exceptional novel . . . Koca is her own (displaced) Dante, guiding herself and her readers through a lively urban nocturne constellated with literature and alight with that most vital and phenomenal of currents: youth' Joyelle McSweeney, author of Toxicon and Arachne'Nazli Koca has the rare gift of making you laugh and weep within a page. Bold and original, the writing pulses with techno, soap operas, and late-night banter. But like the silence between two beats, its profound wisdom and unbearable tenderness reverberate' Sanaë Lemoine, author of The Margot Affair'An exuberant debut from Nazli Koca, who has something to declare about both the boldness and the fear gripping the young navigating the cruel farce of our modern world' Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences 'An important and radical new literary voice' Elif BatumanIt'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 wry, propulsive diary form and with probing self-reflection, Koca radically and courageously explores 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.