Fields of Sleep (Expanded 2nd Edition)

“Poppy was always planted along one edge of the fields. Early in the morning, mothers carrying their children on their backs would go to the fields and lay them down on mats they had spread among the poppies. It was a way to allow the children to sleep while the women worked. The poppy dust would transport the village children into magical dreams. Again, on an autumn evening where dreams mingled with reality, those fields were stained with blood.

Cemal’s blood.

The rains hadn’t come yet. That blood would remain in the fields for a long time.”

In the hot summer of 1961, with Cemal’s death, a curse unknown even to the villagers would touch everyone’s lives in this remote corner of Anatolia. Years later, a female writer who came to the village would reveal the connections between the past and the future in a mystical atmosphere, while also receiving her share of this curse.

“I don’t want any of my sins forgiven. They are mine. I will stand before you in the afterlife and demand an accounting for the pain my difference caused. Only then will my timid soul find peace,” begins this novel, the first by Dr. Ozan Balık, a specialist in Plastic Surgery. Born in a hospital corridor, the story matured over fifteen years, refined through the crucible of life and surgery, and now reaches you, the reader.

You too will witness a never-before-told battle of love, revenge, and honor in your own dream field. Dealing with the sexual identity issues of modern times in the style of a classic Turkish novel, “Fields of SleepF” is partly based on reality and partly on imagination. But what separates reality from dream, anyway…?