![]() Such processes are impressively conveyed in Deniz Ohde’s debut novel. The balance at home is precarious: in the absence of family meals, the television dictates the rhythm of the days, and nothing is ever talked about. His wife must have had spirit once - as a young girl she ran away from the Black Sea village where she grew up - but her rebellious streak seems to have been exhausted. ‘Not my thing’ and ‘We don’t need that’ are standard phrases he rolls out to keep the family in check. For his part, he makes himself invisible on the local industrial estate where he has been dipping aluminium sheet into electrolyte for thirty years. ![]() Her father, who is incapable of getting rid of things and drowns all his fears in booze, advises her to conform as much as she can. She is pigeonholed, harassed, chastised and eventually forced out. ![]() The realisation seeps into the girl like the air that she breathes: with her unusual name, her foreign mother and her working-class father, she is inferior to the others. The girl, who is highly sensitive, is in a frequent state of anxiety, but no one notices, least of all her teachers. The girl enters into a tacit alliance with her Turkish mother, but they are powerless in the face of the man’s violence which he ends up taking out on things in the flat to avoid attacking his wife and daughter. Has the furniture been shifted, is a particular door shut, is there something in the atmosphere? She must gauge the situation carefully to avoid provoking her father: a false move or an off-key remark is enough to set him raging. Each time she steps into her home, the nameless first-person narrator of Deniz Ohde’s gripping debut Sky Glow must immediately interpret all the signs and spot any changes. The little girl is like a tracker reading the landscape.
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