With a twisting, captivating play on perception, this novel presents a frame story about how it came to be written. Containing two main narrative strands set five years apart, the story within is about Kuzey, a former left-wing militant and now a hotel owner, who is writing a novel called The Disenchanted. Kuzey's romance with a young woman is juxtaposed with his descent into alcoholism and despair. The book is set against the backdrop of a beautiful peninsula in western Turkey where a landscape charged with memories lives outside time, but as neither the landscape nor Kuzey can forget, there is no real escape from the peninsula—and appearances can be deceiving.