Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of home-building and modern love, written with Aysegül Savaş’ distinctive elegance, warmth and humour.
Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. Removed from the web of family and its obligations, what traditions and rituals should they establish together?
As they dream about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentary filmmaker, spends her days gathering footage from the neighbourhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs, anxious to know how people really live. ‘Forget about daily life,’ chides her grandmother on the phone, ‘no one cares about that.’
Meanwhile, life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues – parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up – all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?
Praise for Aysegül Savas
“Ayşegül Savaş’ White on White is marvelous, as elegant as an opaque sheet of ice that belies the swift and turbulent waters beneath.”
—Lauren Groff
“A haunting, irresistible novel. In Agnes, Savaş has created one of the great characters of contemporary literature. I loved this book for its depth and perception, for its beauty and eerie rhythms, but most of all for its wonderfully dream-like spell. It’s breathtaking.”
—Brandon Taylor
“Despite the thriller-ish underpinning of the novel and the propulsive unfolding of the relationship at the book’s heart, Savaş’s graceful and intellectual prose is the star of the show here. It makes air-light what might otherwise be a novel ponderous with weighty questions: What is the nature of art? Does it reveal or conceal? What is the nature of human connection? . . . . Like a prism, this novel brilliantly illuminates the human spectrum of connection and longing.”
—Kirkus, STARRED review
“[A] beguiling little novel… Indeed, going out for a stroll is the activity that most resembles the reading of Savaş’s book.” – The New York Times Book Review
Industry Reviews
‘An erudite and elegant meditation on modern life and modern love… Asya and Manu could very well be a couple in a novel by Sally Rooney or Caleb Azumah Nelson… Don’t be deceived by SavaÅ?’s cool, matter-of-fact tone – beneath it lie layers of wisdom, delicacy and subtlety… This is not your typical marriage novel, or immigrant/expat novel, or novel of the city – although it threads together all these tropes. In writing about “the slow and leisurely rot of a day”, with all its delights and anxieties, and in praising its “unremarkable grace”, as Asya hopes to do with her filming, the author has created something remarkable.’
