Sabahattin Ali (Author)
Sabahattin Ali was born in 1907 in the Ottoman town of Egridere
(now Ardino in southern Bulgaria) and was killed on the Bulgarian
border in 1948 as he attempted to leave Turkey. A teacher, writer,
and journalist, he owned and edited a popular weekly newspaper
called Marko Pasa and was imprisoned twice for his political views.
Full of yearning and melancholy. Short, moving and memorable:
reading it is like taking a literary minibreak.
*The Times*
Its prose sparkles with the friction between eastern conservatism
and western decadence. This is above all a tale of young love and
disenchantment, of missed opportunities and passion's elusive,
flickering flame . . . a little reminiscent of Turgenev's First
Love, with a hero every bit as gauche, and a twist every bit as
bitter.
*Financial Times*
A gorgeously melancholic romance . . . a cautionary tale certain to
beguile.
*The Irish Times*
A poignant coming-of-age tale, drenched in disillusionment. The gap
between hope and reality, art and ordinary life, has been explored
in many other novels, but rarely with the unaffected simplicity of
Madonna in a Fur Coat . . .The translation by Maureen Freely and
Alexander Dawe is crisp, capturing Ali's directness and clarity of
language.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Offsets inter-war Berlin's decadent dazzle with bouts of shade,
murk and melancholy . . . recreates a vanished era and dramatises a
doomed relationship, and does so with verve, depth and poignancy.
The result is a miniature masterpiece.
*The National*
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