The Applicant (Grove, 2023)
It’s 2017 and Leyla, a Turkish twentysomething living in Berlin is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland–themed hostel after failing her thesis, losing her student visa, and suing her German university in a Kafkaesque attempt to reverse her fate.
Increasingly distant from what used to be at arm’s reach—writerly ambitions, tight-knit friendships, a place to call home—Leyla attempts to find solace in the techno beats of Berlin’s nightlife, with little success. Right as the clock winds down on the hold on her visa, Leyla meets a conservative Swedish tourist and—against her political convictions and better judgment—begins to fall in love, or something like it. Will she accept an IKEA life with the Volvo salesman and relinquish her creative dreams, or return to Turkey to her mother and sister, codependent and enmeshed, her father’s ghost still haunting their lives? While she waits for the German court’s verdict on her future, in the pages of her diary, Leyla begins to parse her unresolved past and untenable present.
Winner of the 2024 Colorado Book Award for Best Novel
Buy your copy of The Applicant
“This is a book about some of the largest issues of our time—ethnic identity, national belonging, the psychological traumas of patriarchy and White supremacy, sexual ownership, feminist reckoning—but it is also, and perhaps primarily, a book about the intimacy between a character and a reader as one agrees to talk and the other agrees to listen. A powerful debut that heralds a voice intent on being heard.”
— Kirkus, Starred Review
“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Chambermaid”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Koca’s superb debut novel takes the form of a lurid, unsparing diary.”