The Last Apartment in Istanbul

Defne Suman’s new novel chronicles 75-year-old Pericles Drakos’ fraught history as a Greek man living in Turkey – the oppression and grief, the surprising connections and rediscovered loves – in an epic story that weaves its way across seven decades of an ever-changing Istanbul.

Through its 75-year-old narrator, Pericles Drakos, The Last Apartment in Istanbul tells the story of Istanbul's deterioration, beginning from the Coronavirus crisis and weaving its way backwards to the 1950s

I was writing to her, so that she would know me not as this old person whose joints creaked when he rose from a chair, but as the real Pericles: the man who dreamt, deceived, envied, loved…

Pericles Drakos has lived in the exquisite Circle Building for all of his seventy-five years. From its lofty windows, he has seen his little corner of Istanbul shift and transform. But as the area has become increasingly gentrified, Pericles has retreated into its shadowy corners. And when the pandemic hits, his isolation deepens.

But when Leyla, a sparky and beautiful thirty-something moves in, Pericles is enthralled. And when he discovers Leyla is a writer, he decides to put his own pen to paper and record his own fraught history: that of a Greek man subjected to the politics of oppression and intimidation in twentieth-century Turkey.