In the 1920s and '30s, Turkey underwent a fifteen-year "Westernizing" cultural revolution in an attempt to distance itself from its Ottoman-Islamic past. Everything, from the alphabet to the legal system, from education to clothing, was changed; access to the past was restricted for the sake of a "new," forward-looking society. A Mind at Peace is a lyrical tribute to Istanbul, capturing the anxieties of a family as they face the difficult reality of life in the early Republic, founded on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

The promise of modernization gives way to war and fragmentation. In A Mind at Peace, rapid social change and cultural upheaval is masterfully revealed through the psyches of the Istanbulite characters, illuminating the precarious balance between tradition and modernity, East and West.

In Khoury’s new novel, the reader is propelled into a fantastic universe of skewed reality and violent abandon. We follow the path of a young man, Yalo, who is growing up like a stray dog on the streets of Beirut during the long years of the Lebanese civil war. Living with his mother who "lost her face in the mirror," he falls in with a dangerous gang whose violent escapades he treats as a game. The game becomes a frightening reality, however, when Yalo is accused of rape and imprisoned. He is forced to confess to crimes of which he has no recollection. As he writes and rewrites his confession, he begins to grasp his family’s past, recalling all that his psyche has buried, and the true Yalo begins to emerge.