"I wonder if there are words of mine I haven't noticed? Or am I aware of them all?"

In elementary school, teachers would have students keep a "Word Notebook"—a slender, alphabetical index where they would write down new words and use them in sentences to create their own dictionaries.

In The Notebook of Words, Nazan Bekiroğlu returns to this childhood practice to compile a dictionary of her own soul. Love is written at the very top, having existed since eternity. Then comes Humanity, Nature, the stormy Black Sea, and Tea—without which, she wonders, what would we do?

This collection of essays offers a projection of the author's secret universe. It spans from her personal definitions of life to deep reflections on Russian classics like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and the timeless echoes of Ottoman poetry.