Gardens of Water: A Novel

by Alan Drew Narrated by Mark Bramhall

Overview

Powerful, emotional, and beautifully written, Alan Drew's stunning first novel brings to life two unforgettable families-one Kurdish, one American-and the sacrifice and love that bind them together.

In a small town outside Istanbul, Sinan Basioglu, a devout Muslim, and his wife, Nilüfer, are preparing for their nine-year-old son's coming-of-age ceremony. Their headstrong fifteen-year-old daughter, ¿rem, resents the attention her brother, Ismail, receives from their parents. For her, there was no such festive observance-only the wrapping of her head in a dark scarf and strict rules that keep her hidden away from boys and her friends. But even before the night of the celebration, ¿rem has started to change, to the dismay of her Kurdish father. What Sinan doesn't know is that much of her transformation is due to her secret relationship with their neighbor, Dylan, the seventeen-year-old American son of expatriate teachers.

¿rem sees Dylan as the gateway to a new life, one that will free her from the confines of conservative Islam. Yet the young man's presence and Sinan's growing awareness of their relationship affirms Sinan's wish to move his family to the safety of his old village, a place where his children would be sheltered from the cosmopolitan temptations of Istanbul, and where, as the civil war in the south wanes, he hopes to raise his children in the Kurdish tradition.

But when a massive earthquake hits in the middle of the night, the Basioglu family is faced with greater challenges. Losing everything, they are forced to forage for themselves, living as refugees in their own country. And their survival becomes dependent on their American neighbors, to whom they are unnervingly indebted. As love develops between ¿rem and Dylan, Sinan makes a series of increasingly dangerous decisions that push him toward a betrayal that will change everyone's lives forever.

The deep bonds among father, son, and daughter; the tension between honoring tradition and embracing personal freedom; the conflict between cultures and faiths; the regrets of age and the passions of youth-these are the timeless themes Alan Drew weaves into a brilliant fiction debut.

Editorial Reviews

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In a small village outside Istanbul, Sinan, a struggling Kurdish grocer, hears an odd and ominous rumbling. In the rush of destruction that follows, his first thought is for his young son, buried beneath the earthquake's debris -- then for his wife and daughter. It is an impulse that will torment him for years to come.

Gardens of Water is a stunning and inspiring debut. At its center are two families, and the complexities of culture and faith that divide them. Sinan's 15-year-old daughter, Irem, dreams of escaping the drudgery tradition expects of her and finds refuge and hope in Dylan, the 19-year-old son of American missionaries. As their love develops through chance encounters and furtive meetings, Sinan is forced to make decisions both tragic and inevitable. His inexorable journey to the ultimate betrayal is one, as a father, he could never have imagined.

The regrets of age and the passion of youth, the bond between father and daughter, the desire for a different life, the desperate longing to honor tradition while finding a small measure of happiness outside it -- these are the themes around which Drew has fashioned his unforgettable novel. Raw, emotional, and superbly told, Gardens of Water illuminates much more than the differences that divide us; it immerses us in the common ground we all share. (Spring 2008 Selection)

Jason Goodwin

Drew is an American who spent three years as a teacher in Istanbul, where he witnessed the earthquake he describes so well. Making deft use of this background, he has constructed a novel in which disastrous aftershocks rumble all the way through to a tragic denouement. Sensitive and thought-provoking, Gardens of Water is set in a perfectly realized Istanbul, a city where traditionalism and modernity grind together like the fragments of a collapsing building.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

In Drew's well-intentioned if overwrought first novel, cultures clash as a teenaged Kurdish girl and an American boy fall in love over the objection of the girl's father, a Muslim Kurd living in Istanbul. Sinan, a shop owner, tries to keep his American upstairs neighbors, Marcus Hamm and his family, at arm's length. But this is impossible after an earthquake devastates Istanbul, and Sinan and his family end up living in a tent city provided by American missionaries. Marcus, the director of a missionary school, lost his wife in the earthquake; she was found dead, shielding Sinan's son, who was buried alive for three days before being rescued. Now, Sinan watches as his America-obsessed daughter, Irem, falls in love with Marcus's bipolar son, Dylan, and his impressionable younger son, Ismail, slowly becomes converted to Christianity at the camp. The story moves inexorably toward a climax in which Sinan's Muslim pride and Marcus's Christian proselytizing collide with predictably tragic results. Though some may find the ideological conflict that provides the narrative thrust too textbookish, Drew, who lived in Istanbul at the time of the Marmara earthquake, effortlessly transports readers to a wrecked Istanbul and finds shards of hope in the mountains of rubble. (Feb.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Library Journal

This first novel explores the interactions between two families, one Muslim and the other Christian, in an Istanbul suburb during the earthquake that struck Turkey in 1999. Sinan Basioglu fears the influence of his Christian neighbors, Marcus and Sarah Roberts and their son Dylan, on his son Ismail and daughter Irem. He tries to minimize contact with them, but the earthquake binds the two families together. Ismail is buried in the rubble for hours and presumed dead. He survives miraculously when Sarah Roberts sacrifices her life to let him live. Now indebted to Marcus, the Basioglus are also homeless and forced to stay in the refugee camp he runs. Irem is increasingly drawn toward Dylan, Ismail to Christianity, and the novel quickly builds to its tragic conclusion. Drew occasionally descends into melodrama but in general has produced a fast-paced and well-written narrative, one that convincingly explores the tensions between Islam and Christianity and the seismic cultural shifts that can result from natural disasters. Recommended for larger academic and public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ10/1/07.]
—Douglas Southard

School Library Journal

Adult/High School -Set in a small town outside Istanbul after the 1999 earthquake, this remarkable debut novel chronicles the complex relationships within and between American and Kurdish families. United by the illicit romance of Dylan, 17, and Irem, 15, two families cope with the losses presented by the quake and the challenges created by their cultural differences. Dylana€™s father is one of the Christian Americans providing aid in the camp where Irema€™s family has taken refuge. Her father, Sinan, must spend hours away from home working to support his family while also fighting to preserve their values amid incompatible cultural influences. As the relationship between Dylan and Irem develops, Sinana€™s inner struggle between love and honor escalates, causing him to make a devastating decision that will end in tragedy for both families. The power and brilliance of this book lie in the skillfully crafted levels of the plot. Readers will find themselves engaged in Sinana€™s fight to hold his family together while empathizing with Irema€™s desire to redefine herself outside of her conservative Muslim heritage. At the same time, they will be engrossed in the emerging romance while also questioning the motives of the American aid workers in the camp. Sophisticated teens will be further rewarded with the exploration of changing cultural, political, and religious boundaries. This novel will generate a variety of interesting classroom and book club discussions.-Lynn Rashid, Marriots Ridge High School, Marriotsville, MD

From the Publisher

Fascinating . . . a remarkable first novel [of] people struggling to define themselves in a world that seems against them.”
–USA Today

“A real triumph . . . Alan Drew explores, with respect and understanding, clashes between cultures, faiths, and generations. In the end, we find ourselves feeling close to the characters and their world, as it is the very world in which we live.”
–Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants

“Sensitive and thought-provoking, Gardens of Water is set in a perfectly realized Istanbul, a city where traditionalism and modernity grind together like the fragments of a collapsing building.”
–The New York Times Book Review

“A penetrating, tightly focused novel that balances the sweetness of youth and the brooding anxieties of parenthood with a robust understanding of the Muslim-Westerner encounter.”
–Leila Aboulela, author of The Translator

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169120691
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	02/12/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

In the rush of bodies to board the ferry leaving Istanbul for Gölcük, Sinan lost his son.
Five minutes earlier ÿIsmail had been tugging Sinan in the opposite direction, back toward the city, deep into the labyrinth of arcades and electronics stores of the Sirkeci neighborhood. Sinan suspected it was for the exact purpose of missing the ferry home and delaying the pain of the circumcision ceremony that evening. The boy stomped across the bricks in his white circumcision costume, one hand squeezing
Sinan’s fingers and the other hoisting his tasseled staff in the air like a pasha leading a parade. Sinan let himself be pulled for a while,
but the horn had already sounded, and, even though he, too, wanted to delay the ceremony, they couldn’t miss that ferry.
When they had reached Re¸sadiye Avenue, Sinan pulled ÿIsmail into the street just as the traffic broke, Sinan’s shoulders rocking back and forth in an awkward dance on his bad foot. He finally pushed
Ismail through the metal gate to the ferry dock just in time for them to join the throng of men and women leaving work for the day. They ran from the shade of the dock back out into the searing summer sun,
Sinan leading Ismail this time through a sea of elbows, shoulders, and damp backs. They climbed the thin plank of wood used as a bridge from dock to boat, the green water beneath them churning with translucent jellyfish, and they entered the smoky cabin, where Ismail dropped his staff. He let go of Sinan’s hand, and before Sinan could grab his son’s arm, the boy disappeared, swallowed by the wave of bodies.
Now Sinan shoved through the crowd to get to the boy, but his foot made it difficult. He pushed against the stomachs of men smoking cigarettes, turning sideways to make himself thinner. “Affedersiniz,”
he said to each person he touched, in a voice barely concealing his rising panic. “Excuse me.” But the more he struggled forward, the more he was shoved backward by the jostling mob, and soon he was forced all the way to the other side of the ferry, his back leaning against a rusty chain that kept him from tumbling into the Bosporus.
“Allah, Allah,” he said out loud. A man standing next to him glanced in his direction.
“Too many men,” the man said. He lit a cigarette, the smoke flying away from his face. “Too many men, not enough city.”
“My boy’s lost,” Sinan said.
The man turned around. He was taller than Sinan and he was able to see over the heads of the crowd.
“Where?” the man said.
“At the entrance.”
The man stood on his toes and yelled across the cabin in a voice so powerful it silenced the crowd.
“Erkek çocuk nerede?”
That started a chorus of echoes. “Where’s the boy?” strangers called, their voices rising above the sound of the engine straining to pull away from the dock. “Where’s the boy? Where’s the boy?” they yelled into the wind, as the ferry nosed its white hull out into the blue water. “ÿIsmail!” Sinan called, joining his voice to the chorus. The men yelled “ÿIsmail” too, and a pandemonium of concern radiated out through the cabin.
Then thirty feet away, rising above the heads of hundreds of people,
came his son. At first ÿIsmail seemed to be floating under his own power, a princely ghost taken flight in the sea-whipped wind, but as he drew nearer, Sinan saw the shoulders on which ÿIsmail rested. The man elbowed through the parting crowd, a cigarette burning in his mouth, his large, hairy hands wrapped around the boy’s stomach.
Ismail’s white teeth gleamed against his skin and his black eyes shone in the afternoon light. The staff was clasped in his fist, and for a moment he seemed to be a king raised high above the people of ÿIstanbul.
“Te¸sekkür ederim,” Sinan said when the stranger handed him his son.
“Bir ¸sey de¢gil.”


When the ferry docked in their suburb of Gölcük three hours later, Ismail wouldn’t let go of the railing. Sinan touched the top of
Ismail’s head, and reminded him of the gifts he would receive after the ceremony. He tickled ÿIsmail’s armpits and tugged on his earlobe,
which didn’t earn him the usual dimpled smile, much less a loosening of the boy’s white-knuckled grip. A few women, shuffling toward the exit, smiled in sympathy. The man who had carried ÿIsmail on his shoulders slid a one-million-lira note into the pocket of the boy’s white satin vest.
“What’s your name?” the man said.
“ÿIsmail.”
“ÿIsmail what?” the man said.
“ÿIsmail Ba¸sio¢glu.”
“That’s a fine name. A strong man’s name.” The man winked at
Sinan. “Can’t stay a boy forever,” he said.
Sinan thought the man was scolding him for ÿIsmail’s age–nine, at least a year too old for the sünnet–but the man’s smile betrayed nothing but generosity.
When the deck was cleared of people, Sinan touched his son’s hand and felt the boy’s fingers stiffen. “We have to go,” he said.
Behind ÿIsmail, the sun collapsed in red bands along the horizon.
Sinan knelt beside ÿIsmail and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders.
“It will hurt, but that pain will pass and God will know you’re willing to endure pain for him. A man has to endure pain, ÿIsmail. But it will pass.”
Ismail looked at the ground, his long eyelashes pressed against his cheeks.
“Baklava soaked in honey afterward? Two, maybe?”
Finally, the boy smiled.


They had left home that morning, just as sunlight broke above the bay, and took the three ferries the length of the Gulf of ÿIzmit into
Istanbul. Sinan hadn’t been to ÿIstanbul since they had first arrived in the city from Ye¸silli, their village in the Southeast, seven years ago,
but it had been ÿIsmail’s special request to be paraded around the city on the day of his circumcision. Sinan hated ÿIstanbul–too many people,
too much cement, too little sky–but ÿIsmail was fascinated by it.
Even after a full day of stomping around the city that caused Sinan’s foot to ache, his son’s fascination rubbed off on Sinan.
People had been kinder than he had expected. A woman in a pastry shop had offered the boy a slice of chocolate cake laced with pistachio nuts, a bite of which ÿIsmail promptly dropped on the white satin of his pasha’s costume, soiling the garment that had cost Sinan a week’s earnings. A taxi driver gave them a free ride up to Topkapý
Palace, where, like sultans of another age, they gazed out over the shimmering waters of the Bosporus. They marveled at Bo¢gaziçi Bridge,
standing like a huge metal suture between the hills of Asia and
Europe. They counted the boats crisscrossing the Sea of Marmara–
massive tankers that shoved the water aside, lumbering car ferries leaning into the current, driftwood-sized fishing spits–and settled on the number forty-six. As they passed the fish houses in Kumkapý
neighborhood, the musicians at one of the tourist restaurants left their table and followed ÿIsmail down the street, blowing their reed flutes to announce his passing.
Nilüfer and ÿIrem had stayed home to cook the food for the party tonight. If they had still lived in Ye¸silli, Sinan’s aunts and uncles and cousins would have helped, and the whole family would have paraded
Ismail through the unpaved streets. Sinan kept the memories of his own sünnet celebration to himself; he didn’t want his son to know what he was missing. But the images had flashed in his mind throughout the day–his father hoisting him onto their best horse, his mother walking beside him, one hand resting on his knee, and the horse’s belly swaying against her own pregnant bulge. It was one of his last memories of her, and even though her face had been white and she wouldn’t smile, he hadn’t thought to tell his father to get her home.
Three days later, his father would leave Sinan with his aunt while he drove his mother to the good hospital in Diyarbakýr. She was bleeding,
his aunt told Sinan. The doctors would make her better and he would have a little sister or brother when they came home. Only his father came back.
Now the call to sunset prayer echoed from dozens of speakers, the amplified voices ricocheting off the cement walls of apartment buildings.
Sinan was nervous, too, and a knot the size of an apricot had hardened inside his stomach. The walk home took them past the fishmonger’s,
and Sinan gave ÿIsmail money to buy the fish heads and severed tails for the street cats. Eren Bey, the fish seller, wrapped the remains in paper and handed them to ÿIsmail.
“Wait,” Eren Bey said, holding up one bloody finger. From a fernlined basket filled with his best palamut, he grabbed the largest fish,
wrapped it up with a sprig of oregano, and dropped it into ÿIsmail’s hands. “Fish will make you a strong man.” He flexed his bicep and slapped the bump of muscle. “All the women in the world will kiss your feet.”
Eren winked and ÿIsmail smiled.
“Please,” Sinan said, “he’s just a boy.”
“Efendim,” the fish seller said, his hands held out as if he were mildly insulted, “just a joke.”
They stopped at the rotting wooden konak where the street cats lived, but the cats were not there. ÿIsmail threw the fish parts through the broken window anyway, a gift for their return. They took maghrib
prayer at mosque, and Sinan listened as ÿIsmail stumbled through the
Arabic. Afterward, they climbed the hill that led to their apartment,
and the bright lights of the amusement park below spun against the darkening sky. Sinan promised, as always, to take ÿIsmail there someday for a ride on the Ferris wheel.
By the time they reached their apartment, the knot in Sinan’s stomach had grown to the size of a small apple. He massaged the spot with his fingertips and it rolled around inside his stomach. He wondered,
briefly, if he could delay the ceremony one more year. But people were already coming, the sünnetci was already scheduled, and he would have to make his son suffer the pain tonight.
“Go on and see Ahmet,” Sinan said to ÿIsmail. He knew his brother-in-law would spoil the boy, treat him like a child one last time before ÿIsmail had to bear the burden of trying to be a man. “I’ll come and get you at the grocery later.”
Sinan climbed the curving staircase of his apartment building.
American music blasted down the stairwell and rattled the metal railing.
He hated their apartment. From the outside it looked nice: the cement walls were painted yellow and the stairway to the front door was made of mediocre marble that shined when the apartment manager bothered to polish it. But inside you could hear a man whisper through the plywood doors, the plaster walls were chipped, and on stormy afternoons, when the rain rolled across the bay as though the sea had stood up and formed a wall, the wind slipped through the cracks in the mortar and deposited saltwater and cement dust in the corners of the living room.
In the kitchen, Nilüfer was covered in sweat and a dusting of flour.
Little balls of dough stuck to her fingertips.
“Sinan.” She smiled. “Caným,” she said, and purposely pressed her doughy hands to his face.
“Stop that, Nilüfer,” he said, but he let her smear the dough across his cheeks.
She kissed him once on each doughy cheek. Sinan tucked a stray strand of hair beneath her head scarf.
“How long has this been going on?” he asked, motioning with his head toward the music blasting through the ceiling.
She shrugged. “Forty-five minutes?” She looked behind Sinan.
“Where’s ÿIsmail?”
“With Ahmet.”
“Well, go get him. I need to get him ready.” She squeezed loaves of bread he had brought from the grocery that morning. “This bread is too hard. You need a new bread man,” she said. She walked into the kitchen. “The yogurt is runny. This heat is ruining it all. The börek
won’t rise, the peppers are like rubber.”
“Nilüfer, it will be fine,” he said. “I’ll go to the store and get more bread. Stop worrying.”
She leaned a fist on a hip and blew air through her teeth. “As though you don’t worry.”
He touched his stomach and made a face.
She waved her hand at him. “See.”
He laughed. “All right, all right.”
He looked around the corner to where his daughter sat watching television and made sure ÿIrem could not see them before touching
Nilüfer’s hips and kissing her on the lips–a long kiss, the kind he usually gave her only in their bedroom.
“Quit with that,” she said, but her hands rested on his chest. She slapped him on the shoulder and whispered, “We don’t need any more children.”
“What’s this?” Sinan said. Some sort of pastry sat in a circular tray on the kitchen table. It wasn’t a Turkish dish.
“Pecan pie,” Nilüfer said with an astonished lifting of her eyebrows.
“Sarah Haným brought it down for the party.” She glanced toward the ceiling.
“The American’s wife?” he said. “Pecans?”
An American family occupied the sixth floor, the one directly above them. They spent only the summers here, just sitting around,
drinking wine on the terrace, and listening to jazz music, as far as
Sinan could tell.
“Her name’s Sarah,” Nilüfer said, glaring at him. “Sarah Roberts,
and she’s nice.”
“Maybe, then, she could teach her son some manners.” He pointed to the throbbing ceiling.
“We should have invited them. I feel bad.”
“You should be helping your mother,” Sinan said to his daughter,
sticking his head around the corner into the living room.
“Baba, I’ve been working all day.” She didn’t look at him when she spoke. He didn’t know what it was about fifteen-year-old girls, but he had never known a child so rude to her parents.
He glanced at the television. It was an American show dubbed in
Turkish, and the actors’ mouths stopped moving before the lines were finished being said. A scantily dressed blond girl killed monsters with a stake.
He watched the show for a minute, enough to determine that it dealt with the devil and sex.
“I don’t want you watching this. It’s not moral.”
“Baba, Buffy kills the vampires, the evil ones. What’s more moral than that?”
He snapped off the television.
“Baba!”
“Get yourself ready for tonight,” he said. “It’s your brother’s special night.”
Irem ran down the hallway. “ÿIsmail, ÿIsmail, ÿIsmail,” she said, “always
Ismail.” She slammed the door to the room she shared with her brother and the music upstairs stopped.
Sinan let out a frustrated breath of air. “How are we raising our children?” he called toward the kitchen.
“You could say hello to her first,” Nilüfer said, popping her head around the corner of the kitchen.
“So she could ignore me and stare at this stupid box?”
“Sinan, it’s only a television show.” He heard the oven door squeak open. “She’s been working hard since this morning. Be nice.”
He switched on the television again and watched for a minute,
turning his head to the side to consider it. There was killing and there was kissing, enough for him. He shut it off.
“I’m going to invite them,” Nilüfer said, standing in the hallway now.
“No.” It was bad enough they lived above him, but he didn’t want the Americans inside his house, especially on this day.
“Sinan,” Nilüfer said. “It’s wrong. They’re our neighbors.”
He shook his head, but she was already coming toward him with a smile on her face.

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