Set in contemporary Istanbul, Kind-Hearted Sinners gives a lyrical first-person account of the unravelling of a love affair as the unnamed narrator tries to salvage his life from the smouldering remnants embedded in his heart and his mind.

The Istanbul that is revealed is an anonymous metropolis, a setting for the tawdriness and pettiness of ordinary lives and loves that have the potential to become extraordinary and poetic, almost in defiance of the seemingly romantic backdrop of the city.

Two lovers who are never named, never described, lose their identity in their love and struggle to scramble back into individual existence, either through a descent into respectability or into introspection and feeling, and it is only from the ugliness of the situation that the beauty of the life-giving words that compose this novel can be plucked.