The Renovation by Kenan Orhan – Complete Study Material
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan – Complete Study Material
Introduction
The Renovation is the debut novel of Turkish-American writer Kenan Orhan. Published in 2026, it was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026. The novel combines family drama, surrealism, political fiction, exile, memory and dark humour. (The Booker Prizes)
The story follows Dilara, a Turkish woman living in Italy with her ageing father and her husband. Her father is suffering from dementia, and Dilara is preparing her home to accommodate him.
She hires builders to renovate a bathroom.
But when the renovation is finished, she discovers something impossible:
Instead of a bathroom, the builders have constructed a Turkish prison cell.
The cell appears to be connected to Silivri Prison in Istanbul, and Dilara begins to encounter guards and other imprisoned women.
What initially looks like a bizarre construction mistake gradually becomes a powerful representation of exile, memory, political trauma, caregiving and the complicated meaning of home. (The Booker Prizes)
About Kenan Orhan
Kenan Orhan is a Turkish-American writer based in Kansas.
His earlier work includes the short-story collection I Am My Country, which was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize.
The Renovation is his first novel. (The Booker Prizes)
Orhan has said that the novel grew from several personal and literary concerns, including exile, memory, political violence, Turkey, family separation and witnessing his grandmother's memory lapses.
He has also described being influenced by his longing for relatives in Turkey and by his difficulty holding on to images of the past. (The Booker Prizes)
Title Meaning
The title The Renovation initially appears simple.
Dilara is literally renovating her home.
She wants to improve her living space and create a suitable environment for her father.
But the word "renovation" gradually becomes symbolic.
A renovation normally means:
repairing something
improving something
making something new
preserving something old
changing an existing structure
These meanings apply to Dilara's life as well.
She is trying to renovate:
her home
her family life
her relationship with her father
her identity
her relationship with her homeland
her understanding of the past
But instead of creating a comfortable new space, the renovation produces a prison.
This creates the novel's central irony:
An attempt to create freedom produces a space of confinement.
Setting
The novel is primarily set in Italy, where Dilara lives after leaving Turkey.
Her home is in the area around Salerno, while another major imaginative and remembered setting is Istanbul.
The story moves between:
Dilara's Italian home
the mysterious prison cell
Istanbul
memories of Turkey
Dilara's earlier life
the world of the imprisoned women
The movement between Italy and Turkey reflects Dilara's divided identity.
She has physically left Turkey, but emotionally and psychologically she remains connected to it.
Main Character: Dilara
Dilara is the protagonist and narrator.
She is a Turkish woman living in Italy.
Before leaving Turkey, she had worked as a psychologist/child-development specialist, but she has been unable to continue her former career in Italy.
She spends much of her time caring for her father and managing her troubled domestic life. (Kirkus Reviews)
Dilara is intelligent, observant and emotionally complicated.
She loves her father but is also exhausted by caring for him.
She loves her homeland but also left it.
She wants freedom but feels trapped.
She wants to move forward but is constantly pulled backwards by memory.
These contradictions make her a complex contemporary protagonist.
Dilara's Father
Dilara's father is an ageing man suffering from dementia.
His condition is one of the emotional foundations of the novel.
His memory is disappearing.
As he loses his memories, Dilara becomes increasingly aware of her own relationship with the past.
Her father's dementia therefore works on two levels:
Personal level:
A daughter watches her father gradually disappear.
Symbolic level:
A family and a homeland struggle with the disappearance of memory.
The father's illness connects the novel's private family story with its larger concerns about historical memory.
Dilara's Husband
Dilara's husband lives with her in Italy.
Their marriage has become strained.
He is anxious about his health and is emotionally distant from Dilara.
His relationship with Dilara shows another form of confinement.
Although Dilara is legally and physically free, her domestic life does not always feel liberating.
The marriage therefore becomes part of the novel's larger question:
Can a person be free while living inside relationships that feel restrictive?
The Builders
The builders are responsible for the strange renovation.
Dilara expects a bathroom.
Instead, they construct a Turkish prison cell.
When she complains, they do not respond as though anything extraordinary has happened.
Their matter-of-fact attitude makes the situation even more absurd.
This is one of the novel's strongest examples of Kafkaesque humour.
The impossible becomes bureaucratically ordinary.
The Prison Guards
The guards appear inside the mysterious prison.
They are associated with the Turkish prison system represented by the cell.
Their presence makes the fantasy more disturbing.
They behave as if the prison is completely normal.
This creates a contrast between Dilara's disbelief and the guards' bureaucratic certainty.
The Imprisoned Women
As Dilara spends more time in the prison, she encounters other women.
They represent different experiences of imprisonment.
The prison therefore becomes larger than Dilara's individual story.
It connects her with women who have experienced political repression and exclusion.
The cell gradually becomes a strange community.
Complete Storyline
Dilara's Life in Italy
Dilara lives in Italy with her husband and father.
Her father has dementia and needs increasing care.
Dilara is unable to return to the professional life she once had.
Her life has become centred on:
caregiving
domestic responsibilities
her husband's needs
memories of Turkey
financial concerns
her father's deteriorating condition
She feels increasingly isolated.
The Bathroom Renovation
Dilara decides to renovate a bathroom.
She wants a better space for her family.
The renovation appears to be an ordinary domestic project.
But when the builders finish, Dilara discovers something shocking.
There is no bathroom.
Instead, there is a fully constructed Turkish prison cell.
The cell resembles a cell associated with Istanbul's Silivri Prison. (The Booker Prizes)
Dilara's Shock
Dilara initially believes that there must have been a mistake.
She contacts the builders.
But they behave as though everything has been completed correctly.
This makes the situation even more disturbing.
The novel's humour comes partly from this absurd contrast.
Dilara is faced with something impossible, yet everyone around her treats it like a normal building problem.
The Cell
The cell contains recognisable prison features.
There are:
bars
a bed
prison-style facilities
guards
an atmosphere of surveillance
The cell is connected mysteriously to Turkey.
Dilara can encounter people there and hear Turkish.
The prison therefore becomes a kind of doorway between her present life in Italy and her remembered homeland.
Why Does Dilara Keep Returning?
At first, Dilara wants the cell removed.
But gradually something changes.
She begins returning to it.
Why?
Because inside the prison she finds things that have disappeared from her life in Italy.
She hears Turkish.
She remembers Istanbul.
She encounters people who share some connection with her homeland.
She experiences smells, sounds, food and memories associated with Turkey.
The prison is terrifying, but it also feels strangely familiar.
This creates one of the novel's central paradoxes:
The prison becomes a place of emotional freedom.
Memory and Istanbul
Inside the cell, Dilara's memories of Istanbul become stronger.
She remembers:
her mother
family life
childhood
Turkish food
Istanbul streets
the Bosphorus
old friendships
her earlier life
The cell acts almost like a memory machine.
The physical space brings the past into the present.
The Harvard Review notes that the cell allows memories of Istanbul, family and the life Dilara left behind to emerge with unusual intensity. (Harvard Review)
The Meaning of the Prison
The prison has several meanings.
It is literally a prison.
But it also represents:
exile
political repression
memory
grief
caregiving
marriage
loneliness
displacement
psychological confinement
Dilara has escaped one form of imprisonment by leaving Turkey.
But she discovers other forms of imprisonment in Italy.
Thus the novel asks:
Can someone ever completely escape the place that shaped them?
Dilara's Father and Memory
Her father's dementia becomes increasingly important.
He sometimes remembers things and sometimes forgets them.
Dilara watches her father lose parts of himself.
This makes her own memories more precious.
There is a painful parallel:
Her father is losing his memories of his life, while Dilara fears losing her memories of Turkey.
Memory therefore becomes something that must be protected.
The Political Past
Dilara's memories return to the political atmosphere of Turkey before her exile.
The novel refers to events including the Gezi Park protests and other political upheavals. Reviews and the author's own comments connect the novel to his concerns about political violence, human-rights abuses and the consequences of Turkey's political changes. (Kirkus Reviews)
These elements are part of the novel's fictional world and the author's stated inspiration; they should not be confused with an objective political history of Turkey.
Exile
Exile is one of the most important themes.
Dilara has physically left Turkey.
But exile is not simply a geographical condition.
She experiences:
loss of language
loss of professional identity
separation from relatives
separation from familiar places
cultural displacement
nostalgia
loneliness
She lives in Italy but remains emotionally attached to Istanbul.
The prison therefore becomes a physical representation of the psychological condition of exile.
The Prison Becomes a Home
The novel develops an extraordinary reversal.
Normally:
home = freedom
and
prison = confinement
But for Dilara:
home = isolation
while
prison = connection
Inside the cell she reconnects with:
Turkish language
memories
food
people
homeland
lost experiences
The novel therefore challenges simple definitions of home.
Growing Attachment to the Prison
Dilara begins spending more time in the cell.
The outside world becomes increasingly difficult.
Her father is deteriorating.
Her marriage is unstable.
Her professional identity has disappeared.
Italy no longer feels completely like home.
The prison, strangely, gives her something her ordinary life cannot provide:
a connection to the person she used to be.
The Prisoners
The women in the prison gradually become important to Dilara.
She develops connections with them.
The cell is no longer only a symbol of political repression.
It becomes a community.
This creates another paradox:
A place designed to isolate people becomes a place where Dilara finds companionship.
The Husband Leaves
The tension in Dilara's domestic life eventually becomes impossible to ignore.
Her husband discovers the prison and reacts strongly.
He eventually leaves.
His departure makes Dilara even more isolated.
The disappearance of her marriage increases the psychological importance of the prison.
The Cell and Caregiving
One of the novel's strongest ideas concerns caregiving.
Dilara loves her father.
But caring for someone with dementia is exhausting.
The novel does not present caregiving as purely noble or sentimental.
It shows contradictory emotions:
love
frustration
guilt
exhaustion
anger
tenderness
responsibility
This makes Dilara's character more realistic.
She is a caregiver, but she is also a person who needs care and freedom herself.
The Strange Logic of the Prison
The novel does not completely explain how the cell exists.
This is important.
Readers can interpret the prison as:
magical realism
surrealism
psychological projection
metaphor
supernatural phenomenon
The book deliberately resists a single literal explanation.
The impossible cell becomes more meaningful precisely because it does not behave according to ordinary reality.
The Ending
Spoiler section
By the final stages of the novel, Dilara's relationship with the prison has completely changed.
The cell has become more than a mysterious object.
It has become her connection to Turkey, her memories and the people she encounters there.
Eventually, Dilara chooses to remain on the prison side rather than return fully to her ordinary life.
She effectively seals herself into the prison.
Recent discussions of the ending emphasize that the novel leaves the future logistics uncertain but makes Dilara's choice significant: she chooses confinement connected with memory and homeland over the life she has been living outside it. (The Writers' Room)
The ending is deliberately disturbing because Dilara chooses what is literally imprisonment.
Meaning of the Ending
1. Exile as Prison
Dilara has escaped Turkey but never escaped its psychological presence.
The prison shows that exile can become another kind of imprisonment.
2. Memory as Prison
Memory can preserve identity.
But memory can also prevent someone from moving forward.
Dilara's memories of Turkey give her comfort while simultaneously trapping her.
3. Home as Prison
The novel reverses the conventional meaning of home.
Dilara's Italian home does not completely feel like home.
The Turkish prison, paradoxically, provides a sense of belonging.
4. Caregiving and Confinement
Dilara's life has become dominated by caring for others.
The prison may represent her desire to escape the expectations placed upon her.
5. Choosing One's Own Confinement
The ending is especially powerful because Dilara is not simply imprisoned by another person.
She chooses to remain.
This raises a difficult question:
Can a prison become comforting when the alternative is a life without belonging?
Major Themes
1. Exile
The novel explores the emotional consequences of leaving one's homeland.
Exile is not simply moving from one country to another.
It involves losing:
language
community
familiar places
cultural identity
memories
belonging
2. Memory
Memory is central to the novel.
Dilara's father's dementia shows the destruction of memory.
Dilara's memories of Turkey show the opposite problem: memories that refuse to disappear.
The novel therefore presents two forms of memory loss:
the inability to remember
and
the inability to stop remembering.
3. Home and Belonging
The novel asks what makes a place home.
Is home:
where we live?
where we were born?
where our family lives?
where we speak our language?
where our memories exist?
Dilara cannot answer these questions easily.
4. Political Repression
The prison represents political imprisonment and the fear associated with political dissent.
The novel's political dimension is connected to the author's own stated concerns about Turkey's political environment and the experiences that inspired him. (The Booker Prizes)
5. Caregiving
Dilara's father's dementia places her in the difficult position of caregiver.
The novel explores the emotional cost of caring for someone whose personality and memory are changing.
6. Family
Family is both a source of love and burden.
Dilara's father connects her to her homeland.
But caring for him also restricts her life.
The novel avoids presenting family relationships as simply good or bad.
7. Marriage
Dilara's marriage has become emotionally distant.
Her relationship with her husband provides another example of confinement.
The home that should provide safety becomes a place of loneliness.
8. Identity
Dilara's identity is divided between:
Turkey and Italy
past and present
daughter and individual
caregiver and woman
memory and forgetting
The prison makes these divisions visible.
9. Freedom
The novel repeatedly reverses the meaning of freedom.
Dilara is physically free in Italy.
Yet she feels trapped.
Inside the prison she is physically confined.
Yet she feels emotionally connected.
The novel therefore asks whether freedom is purely physical.
10. Grief
Dilara is grieving several losses:
her father's former self
her mother
her homeland
her career
her marriage
her earlier identity
The prison becomes a space where these losses return.
Important Symbols
The Prison Cell
The most important symbol.
It represents:
political imprisonment
exile
memory
grief
caregiving
psychological confinement
belonging
The Bathroom
A bathroom normally represents privacy, cleanliness and domestic comfort.
Turning it into a prison creates an absurd contradiction.
It shows how ordinary domestic life can suddenly become oppressive.
The Door
The door separates:
Italy from Turkey
present from past
freedom from imprisonment
forgetting from remembering
The door is therefore a powerful symbol of divided identity.
The Bars
The bars represent physical imprisonment.
But they also suggest invisible barriers:
cultural displacement
trauma
memory
family responsibility
loneliness
Turkish Coffee
Food and drink connect Dilara with her homeland.
Turkish coffee becomes a sensory reminder of Istanbul and her earlier life.
It demonstrates how memory can return through the senses.
The Bosphorus
The Bosphorus represents Dilara's remembered Istanbul.
It becomes an image of connection between two worlds.
This is appropriate because Dilara herself exists between two worlds.
Language
Turkish is not simply a means of communication.
For Dilara, the language itself carries:
childhood
family
identity
belonging
memory
Speaking Turkish inside the prison reconnects her with a part of herself that has been weakened by exile.
Literary Techniques
1. Surrealism
The impossible prison cell appears within an ordinary home.
The novel treats this impossible event with remarkable seriousness.
2. Kafkaesque Absurdity
The situation resembles Kafka's fiction because bureaucracy and absurdity coexist.
Dilara encounters something impossible, but the people around her respond with bureaucratic normality.
3. Magical Realism
The novel combines an ordinary world with an impossible event without providing a complete rational explanation.
However, readers and critics differ on how best to classify its fantasy elements; it can also be approached as surreal or Kafkaesque fiction.
4. Symbolism
The prison is both a literal setting and a symbolic representation of exile, memory and confinement.
5. Flashbacks
The narrative moves between Dilara's present life in Italy and memories of Turkey.
This structure mirrors the way memory interrupts ordinary life.
6. First-Person Narration
Dilara tells the story herself.
This keeps the reader close to her memories and uncertainty.
7. Dark Humour
The novel's premise is disturbing but also funny.
The builders' reaction to the impossible prison is one example.
The humour prevents the novel from becoming entirely tragic.
8. Irony
The central irony is:
Dilara escapes a country associated with imprisonment, only to find a prison inside her new home.
Another irony is:
The prison becomes a place of belonging.
Political and Historical Dimension
The Renovation has a significant political dimension.
The prison is connected with the Turkish political context that Dilara left behind.
The novel recalls political protests and the experiences of people affected by repression.
Orhan has explicitly said that his own concerns about Turkey's political situation, political violence, human-rights issues, economic difficulties and environmental disasters contributed to the novel's creation. These are the author's stated inspirations rather than claims that should be treated as an objective political assessment. (The Booker Prizes)
The political material is therefore inseparable from the novel's personal story.
The book connects:
national history → family history → individual memory.
A Feminist Reading
A feminist reading can examine Dilara's position within:
marriage
caregiving
migration
domestic labour
political imprisonment
social expectations
Dilara spends much of her life caring for other people.
She cares for her father.
She manages her home.
She deals with her husband's anxieties.
Her own professional identity has been weakened by migration.
The prison therefore becomes a symbol of the invisible labour and restrictions experienced in her everyday life.
An Ecocritical Reading
Although the novel is not primarily an environmental novel, its Italian setting and references to place allow a broader reading of human relationships with landscape.
The question of belonging is connected with geography.
Dilara's relationship with Italy differs from her relationship with Istanbul.
The novel therefore suggests that place becomes part of identity.
A Psychoanalytic Reading
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the prison can be interpreted as an external representation of Dilara's unconscious life.
The things she has attempted to suppress return through:
memories
sounds
smells
language
images
dreams
the prison itself
The cell may therefore represent the part of Dilara that has never escaped Turkey.
The Central Paradox
The entire novel can be understood through one paradox:
Dilara leaves a prison but discovers another prison that feels like home.
This paradox connects all the major themes:
| External Reality | Inner Reality |
|---|---|
| Italy | Turkey |
| Freedom | Confinement |
| Home | Exile |
| Present | Past |
| Forgetting | Memory |
| Care | Exhaustion |
| Marriage | Loneliness |
| Prison | Belonging |
Why Is The Renovation Important for Literary Studies?
The novel is useful for students because it combines several literary traditions.
It can be studied as:
contemporary fiction
exile literature
migration literature
political fiction
magical realism
surrealism
Kafkaesque fiction
feminist fiction
psychological fiction
family fiction
It is especially valuable for studying symbolism because the prison cell operates simultaneously at literal, political, psychological and emotional levels.
Booker Prize Significance
The Renovation was one of the 13 novels longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026. It is one of three debut novels on the longlist. (The Booker Prizes)
The Booker judges described it as a humorous but unsettling fantasy that raises questions about:
political activism
belonging
imprisonment
dementia
exile
The judges also noted that the novel's forms of imprisonment extend beyond a physical prison. (The Booker Prizes)
Important Questions for Students
What is The Renovation about?
It is about Dilara, a Turkish exile living in Italy, who discovers that a bathroom in her home has mysteriously been transformed into a Turkish prison cell.
Who is Dilara?
Dilara is the central character and narrator. She is a Turkish woman living in Italy and caring for her father, who has dementia.
Why does Dilara renovate her bathroom?
She wants to improve her home as she prepares to accommodate her ageing father.
What does she find after the renovation?
She finds a Turkish prison cell instead of a bathroom.
What does the prison symbolize?
It symbolizes political imprisonment, exile, memory, grief, caregiving and psychological confinement.
Why does Dilara become attached to the prison?
The prison reconnects her with Turkey, her language, memories, people and parts of her identity that she has lost through exile.
What is the role of Dilara's father?
His dementia provides an important parallel to the novel's concerns with memory, loss and disappearing identity.
What is the main theme?
The major themes include exile, memory, belonging, imprisonment, family, caregiving, identity and freedom.
What type of novel is The Renovation?
It can be described as contemporary literary fiction incorporating surrealism, magical-realism elements, political fiction and Kafkaesque absurdity.
What happens at the end?
Dilara ultimately chooses to remain within the prison space, making the ending a powerful representation of the complicated relationship between confinement, memory and belonging.
Conclusion
Kenan Orhan's The Renovation begins with an ordinary domestic project and transforms it into an extraordinary story about exile, memory and identity.
Dilara wants to renovate her home.
Instead, she discovers a prison.
At first the prison represents everything she escaped from.
But gradually it becomes the place where she feels closest to the homeland she left behind.
The novel's deepest irony is therefore that freedom and imprisonment are not always opposites.
A person can be physically free but emotionally imprisoned by memory.
A prison can be physically restrictive but emotionally comforting because it reconnects someone with a lost identity.
Through surrealism, dark humour, political symbolism and psychological storytelling, Orhan explores the complicated meaning of home, homeland, memory, family and freedom.
The novel finally asks a difficult question:
If the place that imprisons us is also the place that makes us feel that we belong, can we really choose to leave it?
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