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Boundless Solitude tells the story of Handan Sarp, a soprano at the Istanbul City Opera who has struggled throughout her life to come to terms with her lesbianism in a society that shuns the open expression of female queerness. The story unfolds through a series of vignettes that explore Handan’s childhood, youth, and adulthood in Istanbul in the second half of the 20th century. In her late 30s Handan was involved with a young working-class seamstress named Elem, but their relationship was strained by their class differences and they eventually parted ways. As the novel examines their relationship through Handan’s recollections mourning the loss of her lover, a powerful narrative of nostalgia for a lost past emerges. It highlights the nature of memory as a means of reconstructing the past for a woman whose loneliness results from her inner struggles as a lesbian in the restrictive social environment of Istanbul.
