This month, as immigration dominates the news cycle in the Americas, we’re sitting down with two groundbreaking yet unsettling novels about displacement, assimilation, and exile.
The Renovation: A Novel
Kenan Orhan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pp., $27 February 2026)
This month, as immigration dominates the news cycle in the Americas, we’re sitting down with two groundbreaking yet unsettling novels about displacement, assimilation, and exile.
The Renovation: A Novel
Kenan Orhan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pp., $27 February 2026)
If the premise of Kenan Orhan’s debut novel is decidedly Kafkaesque—“I don’t know by what accident the builders had managed it, but instead of a remodeled bathroom attached to my bedroom, they had installed a prison cell,” it opens—the detail underlying it is chillingly real. The renovated en suite leads to Silivri (now called Marmara), the mega-jail that has become a symbol of Turkey’s authoritarian turn under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
This dance between the real and surreal underpins The Renovation, which follows the narrator, who has settled into an Italian village after fleeing Erdoğan’s crackdown, as she cares for her ailing father and clings to fading memories of her life in Istanbul. It’s a strange and spellbinding tale, heartrending yet humorous, and buoyed by the narrator’s almost nonchalant approach to the botched remodeling. (“After trying in vain to get answers from the builders … I figured I might as well accept life’s peculiar gift to me,” she thinks early on.)
Orhan’s novel is deeply rooted in Turkey’s recent unraveling, from the 2013 Gezi Park protests to the failed 2016 coup and the series of purges in its wake. As religious nationalism surges and freedoms are snuffed out, the narrator and her father—a dissident political scientist—are forced into exile. The dread that consumes the narrator’s family is palpable, even if the recounting of events on the ground occasionally feels like a series of headlines pulled from the 2010s.
Orhan, a Turkish American author, is more convincing in his dissection of the interplay of displacement and language. The narrator is giddy as she adopts a new language, realizing that the contours of her personality shift when unburdened by her mother tongue. In Italian, she is light and airy; in Turkish, melancholy. Yet horror overcomes her when she realizes she cannot recall specific words in Turkish, and she feels relief when the prison guards speak Turkish beyond the bars of her bathroom-cum-cell.
To feel close to her homeland and recover long-lost details of her past, she returns repeatedly to that cell, risking her freedom for a taste of home. The prison’s pull on her parallels the emotional flights of her father, whose late-stage Alzheimer’s has distorted his reality, leaving him simultaneously unmoored yet anchored to a Turkey that no longer exists: “My father has walked into other realities as if they were other rooms, bouts of hallucination furnished by the patchwork images inconsistently flashing in his mind.”—Chloe Hadavas
Good People: A Novel
Patmeena Sabit (Crown, 400 pp., $29, February 2026)
Like many stories set in the Washington, D.C., area, Good People—Afghan American author Patmeena Sabit’s debut novel—is both rich in local color and inherently global. The book exposes the dark underbelly of the region’s prosperity while probing the limits of assimilation and acceptance in the American immigrant experience.
For me, this duality was particularly notable. Good People takes place mostly in the fictional northern Virginia suburb of Riverside, which Sabit confirmed to Foreign Policy is “loosely based on McLean,” the town where I grew up. Sabit accurately describes Riverside as “bucolic suburb” home to “a lot of big names,” where students and parents are “[o]bsessed with super scoring and percentiles.” It was unsurprising to me that the book’s high school-age protagonist would see her life unravel in this intense environment.
Zorah Sharaf appears to have it all: She’s pretty, popular, rich, and smart—in some ways, the encapsulation of her parents’ American dream. The two came to the United States as “penniless” refugees and ascended to a $3 million mansion in Riverside. The Sharafs “became more American than the Americans,” Sabit writes; Zorah’s father hosts lavish Fourth of July parties and “believed money could buy everything.”
The family retains some traditional customs that clash with their teenage daughter’s behavior. Tensions come to the fore after Zorah commits “the greatest offense of all: She began a love affair with a young man.” Zorah’s impropriety leads her to have an “increasingly fractious relationship” with her family. Months later, she dies in what appears to be a mysterious accident. Good People attempts to piece together the story of Zorah’s final year in a documentary format.
Four hundred pages of testimony related to the teenager’s death—from reporters, neighbors, classmates, social workers, attorneys, Afghan elders, gas station attendants, and more—chip away at the “rosy picture of family life” that the Sharafs curated. In the process, Sabit introduces uncomfortable questions about sex, race, wealth, power, and cultural relativism. The result is a groundbreaking novel that is as creepy as it is creative.
Those readers looking for a clear-cut ending will not find one in Good People. An inconclusive police investigation into Zorah’s death triggers a national media firestorm. Meanwhile, the United States experiences an uptick in Islamophobic violence, with “bloodthirsty bigots and xenophobes … concealing their hatred for Muslims behind a phony concern for Zorah Sharaf.”
Sabit’s novel lends equal voice and credence to all of those involved. In her acknowledgments, the author writes that she aims to tell a complicated intercultural story “at a deeper level than the sensationalized narratives that so often dominate the media coverage.” Although Zorah’s life comes to a tragic end, her experience reflects a dilemma that many second-generation immigrants face: “forging their own identities while remaining faithful to the old-country values of their parents.”—Allison Meakem
February Releases, in Brief
The late Mario Vargas Llosa revisits his homeland of Peru in his final book, I Give You My Silence, translated by Adrian Nathan West. In British author Jess Shannon’s debut, Cleaner, an overeducated artist’s new job sends her down unlikely paths. Buried secrets surface in a 1960s Irish village in Chloe Michelle Howarth’s Heap Earth Upon It. Danish novelist Helle Helle’s love letter to her hometown, They, is translated into English by Martin Aitken. Naeem Murr’s Every Exit Brings You Home offers a portrait of a Palestinian immigrant in Chicago on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis.
An Icelandic valley is brought to life in Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness’s A Parish Chronicle, translated by Philip Roughton. Cristina Rivera Garza’s Autobiography of Cotton, translated by Christina MacSweeney, reconstructs the crop’s transformation of the U.S.-Mexico border. Elizabeth Day skewers the British elite in her latest political thriller, One of Us. Polish poet Urszula Honek turns to fiction with 13 interconnected tales in White Nights, translated by Kate Webster. And in Ian McGuire’s White River Crossing, cultures collide on the Arctic fringes of the British empire.—CH
