Staff Pick: The Anthropologists

Ayşegül Savaş’s The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024) follows Asya and Manu, a young expat couple, as they search for an apartment in an unnamed city they have chosen to call home. Each apartment viewing is an invitation to an imagined future. “If we were to live there, we said, we’d come to this café for lunch and late-night drinks, would know the waiters by name. The thought was pleasing, though somewhat foreign, as if we’d put on very expensive clothing that didn’t belong to us.”  

The novel is anchored in everyday life—jobs, visits with friends, quiet conversations, and the balancing act of holding onto their birth families and cultures while carving out a new home. Asya recalls childhood rules—like never lying on the bed with your outside clothes on—but later breaks them, a small but telling sign of redefining mores. While anxiously feeling they should grow up, they can’t resist falling back into afternoon drinks with friends, late-night parties, and commonplace pleasures.  

The Anthropologists is unusual in that it revolves around themes of displacement, identity, modern angst, and isolation, but is also joyful, exciting, nostalgic, and hopeful. Asya and Manu’s relationship is charming and uncomplicated. The narrator’s intermittent use of first-person plural narration reveals the couple’s intimacy. Their private vocabulary, cobbled together from three languages and inside jokes, exemplifies the modernist life they are building.  

Light, searching, affectionate, and occasionally full of angst, this novel speaks to anyone who has ever felt they were living in transition.