Hamish Hamilton wins five-way auction for Orhan's 'surreal fable' debut

Hamish Hamilton has won a five-way auction for The Renovation, an “astonishing” debut novel by Kenan Orhan.

Editorial director Hermione Thompson bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Ana Ban on behalf of Martha Wydysh at Trident Media Group.

North American rights were previously sold to Milo Walls at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Hamish Hamilton will publish the novel as a lead debut hardback in spring 2026.

The synopsis states: “The Renovation is a surreal, elegiac fable about exile and memory, grief and the migrant condition, history, politics and the present moment. A Turkish woman living in Italy wakes one day to find her en suite bathroom transformed, inexplicably, into a prison cell. No one can tell her how this happened. Not the Italian builders who were hired to renovate the bathroom, not the Turkish prison guards, who are paid not to know anything. Nor the woman’s skittish husband – who wants to report it to the authorities immediately and leave town to be on the safe side – and certainly not her elderly father, whose grasp on reality is slowly loosening as dementia takes hold.

“But gradually her bafflement and indignation give way to curiosity, as she is drawn back again and again to the mysterious portal, and through it to a place that both is and is not her home – to the salt wind off the Marmara, the sky full of gulls and domes and minarets – back to Istanbul.”

Hamish Hamilton said of the debut: “The Renovation speaks to modern Europe, to the intrinsically porous borders of identity, language, memory and landscape transformed into prison walls. It asks what it means to belong to a place and what it means to leave it (or to be left) behind. At the same time, it offers a sympathetic portrait of an ordinary family grappling with the dispossessions of everyday life, which must go on even in the midst of history.”

Orhan’s first short story collection, I Am My Country and Other Stories, was published by Random House in the US and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W Bingham Prize. Orhan’s fiction appears in the Atlantic, Paris Review and others. He lives in Kansas and The Renovation is his first novel.

Orhan said: "I am fascinated by the power of mistranslated memory to make up for life’s shortcomings – and by memory’s mathematics, the subtractions and additions that augment our sense of self, what gets lost, conflated and magnified in that process. How can you come out the other side of that in one piece? This book tries to show that for some of us, you don’t – but that it isn’t necessarily a tragedy."

Thompson added: “This is a novel of rare maturity, humanity and richness. It is the work of a young writer deeply attuned to the interplay between past and present, illusion and reality.”