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.