The Applicant

·      The Applicant is inspired by Nazlı Koca’s own life -- she was born and raised on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, spent years of her young adulthood in Berlin, and now lives in the US. Nazlı brings a captivating new perspective to our often US-centric conversation around immigration.

·      The Berlin setting of The Applicant is seedy, lively, cutting-edge, and irresistible.

·      A literary and commercial deeply affecting debut at the cutting edge of conversations around domestic work, immigration, and familial trauma, Koca’s debut deftly walks the line between entertaining and enraging.

·      Nazlı Koca joins Elif Batuman, Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder and Mona Awad as a contemporary young writer of dry humor and razor-sharp prose that lays bare what it is to be a young woman making art under late-stage capitalism. 

·      Nazlı Koca has been compared to Sally Rooney by Elif Batuman for her startlingly intimate portraits of young people who are critical of capitalism. PEN/Faulkner Award winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, whom Nazlı just interviewed in Bookforum, calls the book “an unforgettable meditation on sex, censorship, displacement, and loss.”

·      In Leyla, Nazlı Koca gives us a narrator as unforgettable as the heroines of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Pola Oloixarac’s Mona, and Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City. 

·      The Applicant is a dynamic examination of privilege and power, as Leyla plummets from her favored, protected status as a graduate student to a migrant worker scrubbing toilets, a shift which deeply impacts her experience of Berlin.

·      Like Teju Cole’s celebrated debut Open City, Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees, and Ayşegül Savaş’ Walking on the Ceiling, The Applicant is an addictive meditation on immigrant identity and dislocation. 

·      We’ve received a great deal of foreign interest in The Applicant.