A gritty novel by one of Turkey’s most promising young authors offers an unblinking portrait of the disfigurement and disintegration of a woman whose powerlessness becomes lethal.

Lojman tells, on its surface, the domestic tale of a Kurdish family living in a small village on a desolate plateau at the foot of the snow-capped mountains of Turkey’s Van province. Virtually every aspect of the family’s life is dictated by the government, from their exile to the country’s remote, easternmost region to their sequestration in the grim teacher’s lodging -or lojman-to which they’re assigned. When Selma’s husband walks out one day, he leaves in his wake a storm of resentment between his young children and a mother reluctant to parent them. Marooned by an epic snowstorm, Selma gives birth to her third child, and in the days that follow her growing sense of entrapment and desperation lead to a rage that turns both inward into self-destruction and outward, against her children, who respond with equal amounts of resentment and physical neediness.

Written in startling, raw prose, this novel - the author’s first to be translated into English - is reminiscent of Elena Ferrante’s masterful Days of Abandonment, though its private dramas are made all the more vivid against an imposing natural landscape that exerts a powerful, life-threatening force.

In short, propulsive chapters, Lojman spins a domestic drama crystallized through the family’s mental and physical claustrophobia. Vivid daydreams morph with cold realities, and as the family’s descent reaches its nadir, their world is transformed into a surreal, gelatinous prison from which there is no escape.