"This is surely how history should be told – human, fun, alive." --Telegraph
"Enthralling…A resoundingly successful attempt to tell Turkey’s history." --Guardian
"Insightful, moving and beautifully crafted." --Literary Review
"A rich, spellbinding book: dense with people, stories, history, colour, lived experience . . . The book is alive on every page." --Neel Mukherjee
"Captivating. Kent effortlessly weaves travels that are close to his heart into a bigger story of Turkey’s past and present." --Mishal Husain
“It is hard to find a more complete insight into a country that few writers really know, and even fewer can explain.” --Hannah Lucinda Smith, author of Erdoğan Rising
The Endless Country takes a journey through Turkey’s past – the nation the author’s father left decades ago and he returns to as a young man.
It is not about Erdogan or Atatürk, the two towering Presidents who have book-ended that history, and at times have appeared impossible to escape. Instead Sami Kent’s book goes deep beyond them, revealing a history as rich, layered and absurd as his family’s favourite dessert, künefe: a shredded wheat pastry with a core of melted cheese, a topping of pistachios, and a drowning of syrup.
From tiny weightlifters to the world’s biggest prison, from a failed socialist commune to a wildly successful orchid ice cream, the book is a tribute to the sheer bewildering diversity of Turkey’s past: its people, their ideas and their struggles.