The Next Chapter: "The Anthropologists" by Ayşegül Savaş
"Where do I feel most like myself? I don't know how to answer that question. I guess I'm still looking." — Ayşegül Savaş
“Wait, when did this place stop being foreign?”
You look around and there it is - the residence permit, the rental agreements, the Gementee letters - all quietly piling up on your desk, the reminders of the life you’ve quietly built for yourself here.
In that moment, a thrill goes through your skin as you notice the views outside your window that have become familiar, the café where they start your order before you've asked, or the route home you no longer have to think about.
And suddenly, a thought appears:
“It has become my home”
There’s no ceremony or certificate for the day a strange city quietly becomes yours.
And yet it happens - not in a moment, but in a thousand unremarkable mornings you weren't paying attention to.
★
In our next gathering of The Next Chapter Book Club, we're stepping into The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş — a slim, luminous novel about a young couple building a life together in an unnamed foreign city. They watch their own days the way anthropologists might: the rituals, the friendships, the flat-hunting, the small negotiations of a life being assembled from scratch, far from anywhere either of them began.
Together we'll talk about home and how it's actually made — not from grand decisions but from repetition and the people who become your people.
About what we leave behind to build something new.
And about the strange, tender work of making a life somewhere you didn't come from.
If you've ever built a life far from where you started — and so many of us here have — this one was written for you.
So here's the question all expats and people far away from their motherland keep asking: what makes a place home? And when did you stop noticing that this one already is ✨