Emine Sevgi Özdamar's story of a girl growing up in the politically turbulent society of Turkey of the 1950s and 1960s is told in a raucous, unruly language that matches her world of powerful, raunchy women. Winner of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, Özdamar fuses the poetic and the crude, the ironic and the tender in a rhapsodic journey from the foetus to womanhood, via Turkish steppes, building-sites, baths and cities, to a new life in Germany.