Lords

A queer Chinese American journalist working in Ankara gets caught between the Arab Spring and two very different lovers—a powerful diplomat and an ambassador's daughter—in this provocative debut novel

Geoffrey Mak’s riveting debut novel Lords follows a Chinese-American journalist to Ankara, Turkey, where he assumes a post at a French-language paper. Born in New York and educated in Paris, Lou Yang is bored, ambitious, and self-confident at twenty-six. By day he lurks on the internet, posting about regional news, and in the evenings, he wanders through Ankara’s nightlife district, alone and increasingly restless.

Lou is waiting—for the Arab Spring to arrive in Turkey, for the break that will affirm that he is meant to be a writer and accelerate his career. But as revolution sweeps across the Middle East, something takes hold of Lou, too. Violently, his long-held positions are challenged and, without pretense, start to shift. He plunges headlong into an affair with a secretive diplomat, finds himself in the inner circle of an ambassador’s troubled daughter, and becomes increasingly involved in the activism of his most valuable source, a whistleblowing hacker who is fighting for Kurdish rights.

And as the boundaries—physical, social, and moral—that Lou has previously known and abided by collapse, he discovers that some bodies are less visible than others as they struggle to be seen and heard.