The Undying Grass

In “The Wind From the Plain Trilogy”, acclaimed Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal uses his powerful skills as a storyteller to conjure a vanishing way of life. In rich, lyrical prose, Kemal’s epic of rural Turkey portrays a country and a people uneasily poised between tradition and modernity, between East and West. Each novel follows his protagonists as they struggle to survive in this changing world without losing the traditions and values that define them as a people. The daily struggles draw us into a vibrant culture that is rarely represented for Western readers, but nevertheless evokes universal themes of family, work, suffering, and mortality. Long considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kemal has created in his depiction of Cukurova what William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez envisioned in their dreamworlds of Yoknapatawpha County and Macondo. A student of oral tradition as well as of Cervantes, Stendhal, and Chekhov, Kemal creates legends born of his own experience. Through Thilda Kemal’s skilled translation, the titles that comprise this triology – “The Wind from the Plain”; “Iron Earth”, “Copper Sky”; and, “The Undying Grass” – will now reach an English-language audience in one comprehensive edition for the first time.