“I wanted to infuse the book with a sense of hauntedness, and I realized that one way to do that was to let the victims who are at the center of the novel act as a Greek chorus.” Caitlin Mullen talks with Daisy Alpert Florin about her debut novel, Please See Us, which is currently a 2021 Edgar Allen Poe Award finalist for Best First Novel.
Near the middle of Maureen Freely’s Enlightenment, one character explains to another that in Turkey, “the first thing they make you do in a murder case is put you through a reenactment.” One of the book’s central storylines explores the supposed murder of a mentor of a group of leftist students in Istanbul in the early 1970s. And the novel itself functions as a reenactment, a piecing together of stories and perspectives. But Enlightenment is far more than a murder mystery: it’s about imperialism and politics and human rights, about love and memory, about the subjectivity of truth.
