"Kendine Ait (Belonging to One’s Own) follows a female protagonist, a freelance journalist shaped by a life lived between Turkey and Germany after being left behind as a child when her family emigrated as Gastarbeiter. Carrying the intergenerational traces of displacement, Saliha navigates questions of belonging, memory, and voice while researching forced overseas marriages of women, a project that brings suppressed female narratives into focus. On her forty-second birthday, she gathers six women in a shared circle where personal histories of migration, motherhood, burnout, eating disorders, and early marriage are voiced and held collectively. She then spends a year on an island, choosing solitude away from the crowds that force her to forget who she is.* Moving beyond a conventional migration narrative, the novel examines contemporary isolation, the transmission and loss of feminine knowledge, and the possibility of collective and individual repair, suggesting that belonging to others or to a community can only begin with belonging to oneself.

Echoing Virginia Woolf’s words: "I am not afraid of solitude: I am more afraid of crowds that force me to forget who I am."