Summerhouse: A Gay Thriller

A gay couple’s 40-year relationship is imperiled by a new arrival to their sleepy island paradise: The Birdcage as done by Highsmith.

Fehmi and Şener have been together forty years--no small feat for any pair, but especially admirable for a gay couple in Turkey. Behind closed doors, their life on Büyükada, an idyllic island near Istanbul, is like a powder keg that needs only one spark to blow. That spark soon comes in the form of Deniz, the wildly handsome and troubled teenager next door, who immediately catches Fehmi’s eye.

This ＂harmless＂ crush immediately raises Şener’s hackles; although he doesn’t think Deniz would ever reciprocate Fehmi’s feelings, it’s not a risk he’s willing to take. But when one betrayal leads to another, Deniz hatches a plan, and the sultry summer takes a dark turn as the couple’s relationship is put to the test like never before. Will lust or love win the day? One thing’s for sure: not everyone will be getting out of this love triangle alive.

Dishy, suspenseful, and boiling over with black humor, Yiğit Karaahmet’s debut makes a fierce political statement about supporting ＂gay wrongs＂ while also introducing a shockingly lovable pair of antiheroes who could be Tom Ripley’s grandfathers.

Yiğit Karaahmet was born in the small Black Sea town of Giresun, at a time when disco, glitter, and shoulder pads were sadly on the wane. He later moved to Istanbul where he studied journalism and went on to write about nightlife, popular culture, and lifestyle for prominent newspapers and magazines. Openly gay, Karaahmet has been targeted by the fundamentalist press many times. Summerhouse is his first novel.

Nicholas Glastonbury is a cultural anthropologist of sound, media, empire, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. At present he is a postdoctoral associate in the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. Glastonbury holds a PhD in Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A translator of Turkish and Kurdish literature, he is a co-editor of the e-zine Jadaliyya.