Keeping the House

July 5, 2021
This evocative if slippery debut follows two generations of Turkish Cypriots trying to make their way in England. In 2006, Damla, 15, lives with her immigrant mother, Ayla; two younger siblings; and grandmother in the London neighborhood of Tottenham. She spends her days hanging out with sexually precocious Cemile, whose concerned family sends her to live with relatives in Cyprus, after which Damla loses contact with her. The narration flashes back to the late 1990s, when Ayla engineers a clever way to transport heroin from Turkey into England by growing cabbages with packages of heroin inserted so the leaves will fully enclose them. She convinces a group including Cemile’s father, Ufuk, to help out with the audacious scheme. The plan totters, though, leaving the crew in debt to their notoriously dangerous supplier. Flash forward to the early 2010s, when Ayla announces to Damla that she is moving back to Cyprus. The fragmented chronology and shaggy subplots involving, for instance, Damla’s teenage sexual relationships, don’t really cohere, though the musical bursts of Turkish and blocks of poetry (“Lies have a way of bursting in your mouth. / Her mouth, holding secrets, not the same as lying”) impress. Still, in the end it’s all a bit too oblique.