I was writing to her so that she would know me not as this old person whose joints creaked
when he rose from a chair but as the real Pericles: the man who dreamt deceived envied
loved... Pericles Drakos has lived in the exquisite Circle Building for all of his
seventy-five years. From its lofty windows he has seen his little corner of Istanbul shift and
transform. But as the area has become increasingly gentrified Pericles has retreated into its
shadowy corners. And when the pandemic hits his isolation deepens. But when Leyla a sparky
and beautiful thirty-something moves in Pericles is enthralled. And when he discovers Leyla is
a writer he decides to put his own pen to paper and record his own fraught history: that of a
Greek man subjected to the politics of oppression and intimidation in twentieth-century Turkey.
