Is immortality the ultimate divine reward, or a cruel sentence to witness the endless decay of human history?

In his groundbreaking debut novel, Verses Written on Skin (Tene Yazılan Ayetler), Yavuz Ekinci constructs a dizzying, intertextual maze that challenges the boundaries of life and death. The narrative weaves together the fates of Utanapişti—a man burdened by the exhaustion of millennia—and Berzah, who investigates the tragic murder of a writer named Asvas, whose body was discovered in the chilling "grave houses" of an extremist organization. As Berzah peels back the layers of Asvas’s life, the novel dives into the collective unconscious of humanity, referencing ancient myths and religious texts to solve the existential puzzles of our existence. Ekinci’s spiral storytelling reflects a world where reality is but a fading myth, offering a hauntingly beautiful meditation on the search for an ending in a world fated to repeat its own tragedies.