The Big-Bellied City is a powerful, lyrical novel charting the journey of a Kurdish family uprooted from their village and forced to seek refuge in Istanbul—the “big-bellied city” that promises opportunity while swallowing its newcomers whole. Narrated primarily through the sharp, imaginative consciousness of young Havin, the novel blends poetry, memory, and myth to depict a world where dream and reality coexist in the same breath.

Through Havin’s eyes, we witness the violence of displacement: villages burned, relatives disappeared into the mountains, childhoods shattered by explosions and military raids. Yet Samancı’s narrative is far from bleak; it is rich with humor, family quarrels, tenderness, and the surreal visions through which children make sense of trauma. Grandmothers curse modern toilets, fathers pursue work in the sprawling metropolis, mothers reinvent themselves, while children navigate poverty, prejudice, and the chaotic beauty of their new environment.

As Istanbul transforms the family, it also mirrors the political machinery that forced them into exile. The father grows hardened and estranged; the grandmother clings fiercely to tradition; Havin becomes a nomad in her own language, searching for meaning in a city where every street corner echoes with both promise and danger.

Samancı constructs a mosaic of voices—relatives, neighbors, laborers, street vendors, imams, Roma musicians—all contributing to a portrait of migration that is as sociologically precise as it is poetically charged. The novel ultimately reads as an elegy to Istanbul itself: magnificent, merciless, and unforgettable.

The Big-Bellied City is a searing, imaginative portrayal of forced migration and survival, infused with mythic imagery and grounded in the everyday realities of Kurdish life. It is one of Suzan Samancı’s most accomplished and internationally resonant works.