THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD LONGLIST * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER, TIME, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, AND ELECTRIC LITERATURE * A DAKOTA JOHNSON x TEATIME BOOK CLUB PICK * VULTURE #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR * A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE SELECTION
“The Anthropologists is mesmerizing; I felt I read it in a single breath.” -Garth Greenwell
“Savas is an author who simply,
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD LONGLIST * NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER, TIME, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, AND ELECTRIC LITERATURE * A DAKOTA JOHNSON x TEATIME BOOK CLUB PICK * VULTURE #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR * A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE SELECTION
“The Anthropologists is mesmerizing; I felt I read it in a single breath.” -Garth Greenwell
“Savas is an author who simply, and astoundingly, knows.” -Bryan Washington
Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family?
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you’re filming a park.”
Back in their home countries parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly out of reach. But Asya and Manu’s new world is growing, too, they hope. As they open the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?
Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love, written with Aysegül Savas’ distinctive elegance, warmth, and humor.
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Paperback
- July 2025
- 192 Pages
- 9781639736683
Buy the Book
$17.99
About Aysegül Savas
Aysegül Savas is the author of the novels The Anthropologists, White on White, and Walking on the Ceiling; the story collection Long Distance; and the nonfiction book The Wilderness. Her work has been translated into seven languages and her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker. She lives in Paris.
Praise
“Utterly enchanting.” —The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice
“2024 was the year of the breakup book . . . Here is an antidote. Manu and Asya’s concerns are modest . . . It’s a joy to be on this journey with them. Each sentence sings, and watching [them] find a home in each other rather than in the places they’ve been is defiantly, explicitly hopeful.” —Vulture, #1 Book of the Year
“A novel that takes as its subject the texture, routines, and rituals of a particular lifestyle-itinerant and youthful, or at least untethered by children-and serves as sort of a field guide to its participants . . . Savas approaches her novel with a keen awareness of the reality through which it crafts and filters its make-believe.” —Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic
“An erudite and elegant meditation on modern life and modern love . . . Don’t be deceived by Savas’s cool, matter-of-fact tone–beneath it lie layers of wisdom, delicacy and subtlety.” —The Guardian
“The peculiar habits and folkways of the creative class are on study in Savas’s latest . . . Asya and Manu are on their own, left to figure things out from day to day, and, in that figuring-out process, life takes its form. Passing time, the book suggests, is all that there is.” —The Wall Street Journal