... and the boy lost his faith in God!
Yakup Almelek

Price: $5.95
ISBN: 978-9944-0709-7-3

The eight stories in this book will take you on a journey through time and space: a fairytale world where a boy befriends an eagle, the Jewish quarter of Ankara during the Second World War, a ship sailing from Haifa to Istanbul, east of Eden just after the Fall, the peaceful town of Ion... these are just some of the stops along the way. Wherever or whenever the stories might be set, though, Yakup Almelek shows us that often a child can see what an adult cannot, that often what we think is good for us can hold unforeseen circumstances, and that sometimes we will never understand how our grown-up minds work. Through these stories, we come to see that often the simplest questions yield the deepest answers.

The Awakening
Yakup Almelek

Price: $7.95
ISBN: 978-9944-0709-9-7

Ayla is twenty-eight years old. She lived the first half of her life in the heart of a caring family, but when she was fourteen, she fell out of a boat into the sea and her father lost his life trying to save her. Since that day, she has lived alone with her embittered mother as a semi-recluse; it is as if she is hemmed in by a burden of grief and self-accusation for what was a tragic accident. For fourteen years, this trauma and its aftermath, the weight of the unspoken words of love and reproach between her and her mother, has tainted her life. As the play opens, Ayla has reached the point where she has decided to try to reclaim her life. She has just found a job at a surgery, hoping that the troubles of others will help her forget her own. Her increased interaction with the outside world leads to an Awakening in her life; she finally opens her eyes and is able to put her past, present and future into a healthier perspective. This transformation in Ayla’s life and worldview cannot fail to be an Awakening for her mother too. As the play progresses, they gradually begin to find each other after a fourteen-year hiatus in their mother-daughter relationship. At the final curtain, Ayla has evolved from being a social, psychological and emotional misfit into a fully integrated member of society.

Betrayal has, in all probability, existed as long as humanity has; it is found in the ebb and flow of life itself in recent or in ancient times, in religious texts or in literary works, in the causes of wars on historical inscriptions or in newspapers today... In this play, Yakup Almelek starts with the results of betrayal. The play begins with scenes of stale everyday life, and in the final scenes dredges up the truth lurking behind all these scenes: a surprisingly tawdry and contentious truth with no single, easy interpretation... Beyond Betrayal tells the story of two brothers whose lifestyles and worldviews are diametrically opposed to each other. The incompatibility between them first manifests itself as they are entering adulthood and goes on to have a profound effect on the rest of their lives. One of the basic themes of the play is that the difference between good or bad is rarely clear cut and seldom easy to extricate from the interplay of action, motivation and consequence. Where does selflessness end and selfishness begin? And, more importantly, do the consequences of a morally reprehensible action constitute its own punishment? We see the main character of the play suffer for twenty-two years after choosing career over love. We see his brother perform a noble deed that (coincidentally?) also happens to fulfil his carnal desires. This play does have a somewhat happy ending in keeping with the belief that, provided there is enough will and effort, a negative can be turned into a positive. However, this transformation is not without a price and in Beyond Betrayal, we are afforded a glimpse into the process of acceptance and catharsis that the main character must undergo before transcending the negative residue left over from his actions in the past.

The Businessman
Yakup Almelek

Price: $8.95
ISBN: 978-9944-0709-2-8

The hero of the play is one of the country's most successful businessmen. He bases his life on money and power... until the day he finds out that he has an untreatable illness... In this play, Yakup Almelek reformulates the dilemma of health or wealth in a contemporary setting. He notices that money and power are of no use without health. In his desperation, he starts to reorder his life on his own terms. He unites his efforts to be himself again, purified of past mistakes, with his search for a cure. The little things that he had not been able to see until then suddenly gain new meaning in his life, and together with the urge to settle scores with his past, they take him to Sicily, where the happiness, health and love that no wealth or knowledge can ever give are waiting for him in a humble guesthouse in a little village. Because nothing of his former life, a life where he had become a symbol of power and where he thought he held sway over everything, remains, because he has broken the cycle with a human approach, he reaches a point far surpassing all his hopes...

The Gift
Yakup Almelek

Price: $7.95
ISBN: 978-605-4092-05-5

A man, a woman, a business suite... That is how our play begins. Businessman Ahmet Gür is left head to head with hostess Ayşe because the guest he is waiting for from Japan is three hours late. But is three hours enough to spice up two people's lives?

The Governess
Yakup Almelek

Price: $6.95
ISBN: 978-9944-0709-8-0

Two women... the same time... different places... while one is bringing new life into the world, the other is suffering the pain of having lost her child. After a difficult pregnancy, Leyla Beyaz gives birth to a baby girl. The next day, there is a surprising, undeniably clear, confident reply to an advert in a newspaper looking for a governess: "I'm on my way!" From then on, the Governess will have an irreplaceable position in the life of the newborn and her family; she even believes that her own lost daughter has been reborn as the Beyaz family's daughter. As this play comes to a climax, just how important a role the Governess plays in their lives becomes shockingly apparent.

The Great Ignorance
BÜLENT KUYUMCU

Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-605-4092-14-7

In The Great Ignorance, BÜLENT KUYUMCU tries to answer the same question that Bernard Lewis posed about the Muslim World: What went wrong? The answer is clear: Islam. Not Islam per se, but Islam as it has been imposed on Muslims by the clerical and ruling classes for the past one thousand four hundred years, an Islam that is not practiced in accordance with the Quran and God’s commandments. Muslims have had their critical faculties blunted and have been kept far from the real meaning of the Quran, the source of their own religion. Instead of being encouraged to understand the essence and spirit of