Sins & Innocents - Softcover

Radikal Daily Newspaper - "Book Supplement", 20-05-2011, by Omer Turkep: "Innocents is an impressive novel that carries both the melancholy of the lost and the hope for the future. The Romantics had a pattern of running to the nature due to nausea of modernism. Brani Tawo, the protagonist of Innocents, has a voice of romanticism but we should call it a revolutionary romanticism because of his willpower to change the life." Taraf Daily Newspaper, 29-05-2011, by Pakize Barypta: "Burhan Sonmez is a silent revolutionary in our literature. The novel of Innocents agitated me. A limpid and pure language, a core-language. Sorrow and sadness get a poetic character through Innocents. It is a contemporary song and a scream of innocence. Innocents is a literary black-hole in a positive way. It swallows readers, and gets them through a black-hole, and transforms them into an emotion-man and a truth-seeking-man." Ozgur Gundem Daily Newspaper, 06-07-2011, by Dervip Aydyn Akkoc: "Burhan Sonmez opens the door of wounded memory of Kurds. He doesn't have a proclivity for questions of Who am I? or What am I? He asks: Where am I?" Star Daily Newspaper - "Book Supplement", 11-08-2011, by Erdinc Akkoyunlu: "Some novels summarize themselves by their first sentence. It's first sentence leads us to understand that Innocents is an exceptional novel due to its literary features. The novel begins with a style as if this book belongs to Marquez. You may think that the place in the novel is not Haymana in Anatolian Plains but Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The parts of Innocents that take place in Cambridge whisper us a style that is plainer than Ernest Hemingway's. By its theme and way of telling stories Innocents is a successful example that we haven't seen in our literature for a long time." BirGun Daily Newspaper - "Book Supplement", 16-06-2011, by Dogup Sarpkaya: "Burhan Sonmez salutes Marquez with his breath of magical realism that comes into leaf in Anatolian soil." Cumhuriyet Daily Newspaper - "Book Supplement", 16-06-2011, by Metin Celal: "If it was Yapar Kemal who wrote this stories he would keep the same way of wording but the novel would last hundreds of pages. Burhan Sonmez can be regarded as Yapar Kemal's tight-lipped son. Innocents has a fluent and minimal wording. It's construction is subtly woven."

Two young people from foreign lands meet in a shop in Cambridge: Brani Tawo, a Kurdish political refugee from Turkey, and Feruzeh, who had fled to the UK from revolutionary Iran. Slowly, their love begins to grow, fed by stories, a shared love of literature and a subtle recognition of their mutual displacement. Brani Tawo narrates vignettes from his family history, vivid tales that evoke old legends: shepherds struck by lightning, soldiers returning home with war trauma, blood feuds that destroy families, bears mauling villagers in search of stolen cubs and a photographer who carries news to the villages in the form of the portraits he takes. These dark, inherited memories, combined with his own melancholy nature and chronic insomnia, weigh on Brani Tawo, who often seeks contemplative solace in graveyards. Over time, however, drawn by Feruzeh's quiet radiance, he begins to reach a freer place within himself. Feruzeh also harbours grim family secrets, and when she suddenly returns to Iran to attend to an emergency, Brani Tawo knows what he must do - Sins and Innocents is a warm, intimate love story redolent with the (often harsh) music of Central Anatolian village society as well as the Cambridge sophistication of Wittgenstein, Brooke, Grantchester Meadows, colleges, churches and cafes.