The Wind Gatherers
Novel · 2021 · 14th printing
Novel20247th printing
The Light at the Bottom of the Well
A hydrologist returns to her village after forty years and finds her own childhood at the bottom of a dry well.
About the book
Selma Akkuş has spent forty years looking for water: first on the dry plains of Anatolia, then in deserts on the other side of the world. Three months before she retires, a letter arrives from the village where she was born. The single well has run dry, and the seven remaining households believe she is the only person who knows where the water went.
When she returns she finds no water at the bottom of the well but a chest: inside it a notebook from the summer of 1974, two letters and a map drawn by a child. A girl disappeared in the village that summer, and no one ever said her name again.
A novel about drought and, just as much, about silence: what surfaces when the water withdraws, and how a community buries its own story.
From the book
“Drought is not the rain stopping. Drought is nobody waiting for rain any more.”
“A village remembers as deep as its well; once the bottom shows, everyone looks the other way.”
“For forty years I looked for water. It turns out I was looking for the ones who kept quiet.”
In the press
“Yalın turns drought from scenery into a moral question. The most assured novel of the year.”
— Kitap Eki, March 2024
“Her sentences behave like water: calm, insistent, and in the end they wear everything down.”
— Edebiyat Defteri
Book club questions
Use and copy them freely. Club guide →
- 1.Is Selma’s return a resolution or a reckoning? What do you think she went looking for?
- 2.Whose memory does the water stand for? What did the well running dry make visible?
- 3.Can the villagers’ shared silence be a form of protection? Have you witnessed such a silence?
- 4.What does the difference between the 1974 notebook and Selma’s voice tell you?
- 5.Is the rain in the final chapter really forgiveness? Could it be read another way?
- 6.The title says “light”, yet most scenes happen in the dark. What does that choice do?
Buy
For independent bookshops and city-by-city stockists see the Where to Buy page.
Signed and dedicated copies
- Signed copies are shipped by Liman Kitap (Sinop) and Kıyı Bookshop (Izmir).
- For a dedication, add the name to the order note; dedicated copies are prepared once a month.
- Books mailed in to be signed cannot be accepted; at signings there is no limit.
