5 books
Mario Levi (1957–2024) was a Turkish novelist whose fiction explores Istanbul’s multilingual memory, family stories, minority experience, and the ache of belonging. Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale follows generations of a Jewish family as homes, relationships, and neighborhoods change across the twentieth century. Its scale allows the city to emerge through domestic detail rather than as a decorative backdrop. Our Best Love Story turns toward the stories people build around intimacy, loss, and remembrance. Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale is the substantial route into Levi’s world because family history and urban history continually reshape one another there. Our Best Love Story offers a more concentrated counterpoint. In both, memory is unstable but necessary: characters return to earlier versions of the city in order to understand the lives they can no longer recover.
