Walking On The Ceiling by Aysegul Savas [Paperback]

Walking on the Ceiling by Aysegül Savas is a literary coming-of-age novel about Nunu, a young Turkish woman who moves from Istanbul to Paris after her mother’s death.

In Paris, she meets M., an older British writer whose books about Istanbul she has long admired. Their relationship develops through long walks, conversations, and letters. Nunu begins telling him stories about her childhood, family, and Istanbul, partly hoping to inspire his new novel.

As their intimacy grows, however, Nunu is forced to confront the silences and conflicts surrounding her mother, her father’s death, her memories of Istanbul, and her own guilt. She gradually realizes that some of the stories she has created about her past may be ways of protecting herself from painful truths.

The novel explores memory, grief, identity, storytelling, family, displacement, guilt, and the blurred boundary between lived experience and imagination.