Akbaba's Works

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The Canvas Grins: A Painting in Prose

What if a novel was more than just words—what if it was a painting? In this masterwork of literary artistry, Akbaba crafts a story that unfolds like a painting in motion. Through hypnotic stream-of-consciousness, we follow a narrator searching for a mother who disappeared with the dawn. As the protagonist walks through streets warped by heat and recollection, the past flickers like paint on an unfinished canvas, never quite dry, never quite whole.

 

The Man Who Mistook Himself for a Memory

Remzi Yılmaz, once a celebrated bridge engineer, finds himself at the edge of his own collapsing world. As his wife Neşe vanishes to another country—or perhaps another reality—time fractures, numbers blur, and the boundaries between past and present dissolve. A profound meditation on memory, loss, and the fragility of self, this novel delves into the unstable architecture of identity.

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The Horseless Riders' Odyssey

An allegorical journey through a world where maps no longer hold meaning and travelers ride toward destinations that may not exist. This intellectual excavation plunges deep into the landscapes of memory, loss, and the elusive nature of meaning, crafting a world where atonement and regret blur, where fate is dictated not by divine will but by the unrelenting machinery of time.

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Once Upon a Time in Moscow:
The Red-Haired Maiden  (Book 1 of 4)

As the Soviet Union approaches its twilight, the Red-Haired Maiden haunts not just Moscow's streets, but the hearts of those who once believed. This sweeping four-part epic chronicles the psychological ruins of an empire—the ideological ghosts that haunt those left behind, and the longing for certainty in a world built on disillusionment.

Once Upon a Time in Moscow: The Red-Haired Maiden

As the Soviet Union collapses, Once Upon a Time in Moscow: The Red-Haired Maiden unfolds a story of devotion, disillusionment, and the struggle for identity in a world undergoing irreversible change. The Red-Haired Maiden is not just a character but an embodiment of lost ideals, an echo of a vision that once burned brightly and now lingers in the twilight of a fading ideology.

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Set against the shifting streets of Moscow, the novel follows the last believers aboard the Red Ship, those who refuse to abandon the dreams that once defined them. But as faith fractures and history reshapes itself, the question remains: Was it belief or inertia that held them together? And when an ideology collapses, does its psychological grip ever truly vanish?

Blending the psychological depth of Dostoevsky, the existential unease of Kafka, and the poetic realism of Márquez, the novel explores love and war through a lens of magical realism and surrealism, where passion and destruction intertwine, and reality bends under the weight of history. It is a story of Soviet intellectuals, of the forces that both strengthened and weakened a people, and of a world where the lines between past and present, devotion and betrayal, myth and memory blur.

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Once Upon a Time in Moscow: The Red-Haired Maiden is the first volume of a four-part literary work that traces the ideological, social, and personal ruptures of a changing world—where memory is rewritten, identities are reshaped, and belief is both a prison and a lifeline.

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The Lost Children Cannot Draw Their Mothers Happy

In this poetic debut novel, young Hıdır draws what he sees—and sometimes, what he cannot. His art breathes life into birds and flowers, but his mother's happiness remains just out of reach. A deeply moving meditation on childhood, memory, and the invisible ties that bind us, this novel explores the power of creation as a bridge between what was and what could have been.

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Writing Style

Akbaba's novels are crafted for intellectual readers who seek narratives that challenge conventional understanding of time, reality, and memory. His work is an invitation to question what we know, to reconstruct the past from fragments, and to navigate the landscapes of identity, history, and loss. Each novel serves as a meditation on fate, agency, and the fictions we create to survive.