They Burn the Thistles

by Yashar Kemal

Published 21 November 2006
Turkey’s greatest novelist, Yashar Kemal is an unsurpassed storyteller who brings to life a world of staggering violence and hallucinatory beauty. Kemal’s books delve deeply into the entrenched social and historical conflicts that scar the Middle East. At the same time scents and sounds, vistas of mountain and stream and field, rise up from the pages of his books with primitive force.

Memed—introduced in Kemal’s legendary first novel, Memed, My Hawk, and a recurrent character in many of his books—is one of the few truly mythic figures of modern fiction, a desperado and sometime defender of the oppressed who is condemned to wander in the blood-soaked gray zone between justice and the law. In They Burn the Thistles, one of the finest of Kemal’s novels, Memed is on the run. Hunted by his enemies, wounded, at wit’s end, he has lost faith in himself and has retreated to ponder the vanity of human wishes. Only a chance encounter with an extraordinarily beautiful and powerful stallion, itself a hunted creature, serves to restore his determination and rouse him to action.

Memed, My Hawk

by Yashar Kemal

Published 1 December 1978
In the Taurus highlands of Anatolia in the 1930s life is harsh and the five small villages on Dikenli, the Plateau of Thistles, are ruled by the owner of the land, Abdi Agha. Ince Memed, the only son of a poor widow, plans to escape his servitude by fleeing Dikenli with his beloved, Hatche. The Agha catches the couple as they attempt their escape. Memed wounds the Agha and disappears into the night but Hatche is captured. Memed, still only a youth, becomes a brigand in the mountains, driven by his determination to rescue his beloved and settle accounts with the vindictive Abdi Agha. Yashar Kemal's first novel, originally published in 1952, combines a narrative of great excitement and drama with a strong and simple portrait of the rigours of peasant life, vivid in its detail and observation.