Madonna in a Fur Coat

Raif Efendi works as a quiet, unremarkable translator in a small company in Ankara; he is an ordinary man who draws no one's attention—until the narrator gets hold of a black-covered notebook hidden in his drawer. Between its pages, the trace of a love that marked an entire life, lived in 1920s Berlin, begins to emerge.

Young Raif, sent to Germany to learn the soap trade, stands transfixed before Andrea del Sarto's painting "Madonna in a Fur Coat" at an exhibition. The woman in the painting soon appears in real life: proud, fragile, enigmatic Maria Puder. The relationship that begins with this woman—who sings in a nightclub and painted her own portrait—reverses all the roles of conventional love stories; the woman is the dominant one, the man is the fragile one.

This short novel, published by Sabahattin Ali in 1943, remains one of Turkish literature's most introspective, most melancholic, and still most widely read works. It is a simple yet deeply shattering masterpiece about loneliness, identity, the power balance in male-female relationships, and how a lost love is carried throughout a lifetime.