Feridun Zaimoglu

It is early in the morning when his mother calls to tell him that his father has died. The narrator, a writer from Kiel, doesn’t know what to do, he is alone in his grief. Gradually, he realizes that he has to go to Turkey to support his mother – and stand at his father’s grave to say goodbye to him.

However, he suffers from a fear of flying and does not drive. Two friends take him with them in a camper van and they set off on an adventurous journey of 5,000 kilometers to Edremit and back. It becomes a road trip across Europe that is characterized by memories of his father: the husband, the pieceworker, the storyteller or the septuagenarian whose dyed sideburns could cause an entire vacation settlement to riot. At the same time, the narrator travels inwards and reflects on his upbringing as the child of so-called guest workers in Germany, his relationship with his parents and his own identity between two cultures.

Sohn ohne Vater is Feridun Zaimoglu’s most personal novel to date – in which he asks how we remember those who are closest to us and yet who sometimes seem strangely alien to us,

Feridun Zaimoglu, born in 1964, is an author, screenwriter and playwright