Emin is a settler in the area who dreams of owning his own home, an easy enough task in the village. But city law prohibits building in the slum area, where rights of ownership are obscure.

But these simple hopes and dreams—a marriage based on love or a new home for the family—all are destroyed by the wagging tongues of the ignorant neighborhood gossips. The women are jealous that someone else's daughter might make a better marriage than their own. The men are jealous of each other's wives. Everyone is jealous of their neighbors' money. And when all this jealousy and petty rivalry boil over into an act of ruthless violence, the neighbors ask each other, "How did this ever get so far out of hand?"

Kemal Ates uses short, simple lines of dialogue to express the thoughts and feelings of a group of people, who are mostly illiterate peasants, backward and ignorant, but always ready to defend the "family honor," which they consider the only thing money can't buy.

Outcasts of the Homeland will leave you with a feeling of "having been there" and you'll understand why slum dwellers the world over prefer the slums to their homelands and how they are sometimes forced to abandon the land, which has been exhausted with overplanting, before it abandons them.

Foremost Press gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution of The Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey to the translation of this book.

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