What a great debut novel. Raised many important topics and talked about issues that need talking about.

This is a debut work which I read as an audiobook. It's an immigrant story of a twenty something Leyla from Turkey who has moved to Germany to study. She has submitted her thesis but has sued the university which failed her, to try and reverse that verdict. Her struggle is to stay in the country while waiting for the verdict while trying to make a living. She works as a maid for a small hotel just so she can keep afloat.

The book is written as diary entries for the six months as she waits. Her friendships with her co-workers form part of her struggles. Even though their backgrounds are different, the immigrant experience is similar. She provides an insightful look into the lives of those who run the risk of falling into the cracks and are desperate to get it right. To provide for herself for those months, she is forced to do things she would never even dream of doing normally. Her attempt to stay in touch with family while making the best effort to not join them back in the country is ridden with guilt. There are complex issues which I think the author brought out quite evocatively.

I enjoyed the book though I wish it had been longer. I would like to know if Leyla's dream to become a writer is fulfilled or not, whether she finds love with the swede or not. I would have like the ending to be more conclusively happy. it was a very interesting read which I will be recommending and the narrator of the audiobook dd a great job.

My thanks to Netgalley which provided me the book to read for a review.

This book was just like as cold sharp and clean as I was hoping in narration.I felt like I was wishing Leylas head as I truly felt for her.

I accessed a digital review copy of this book from the publisher.
The main character and writing style just did not appeal to me. Because of my dislike, it made this short book seem extremely long and difficult to get through.

Thank you NetGalley and RB Media, Recorded Books for accepting my request to audibly read and review The Applicant.

Narrated by Günes Sensoy
Published: 02/14/23

My love/hate relationship with Literary Fiction scores a tally mark for love. While I didn't actually love the book, I did enjoy the story. I found myself wondering about the author's second book, after all this is a debut novel.

There are a multitude of issues with the main character all based on her family, education, nationality, and socioeconomic standing. The author does not write a whiney story. The main character is smart, driven, and average. I have good days, get a lot done; then have days where I don't care. I was able to appreciate Leyla, her choices, and her thinking.

This is not a complex story where flow charts are needed. This is the story of a woman finding her way in life while being at the bottom of the pecking order with loads of reasonable adult responsibilities.

The narrator did a good job. In the future, recognizing her name would have me stop and read a synosis.

There is profanity.

I will take a debut author over an established one every time, and I'm glad I didn't miss this. 3.5 stars, I'm not comfortable rounding up. This needed tweaked, but well worth my time and energy.

Leyla is a student from Turkey who only wants to be a writer. In her heart, it is who she is. When her thesis is rejected, she takes a break from university and is granted 6 month reprieve. She is working as a cleaner in Berlin for as many hours as legally allowed. Should she stay in Germany, should sho go back to her home country where the politics, poverty, room for growth are not what she feels will fulfill her in any way? Will she win her lawsuit and either way, what is next for her? She writes, writes and writes and about her experiences, those around her all while questioning what her life is about and where to go from where she is. She questions everything and is trying to navigate her life. Its an interesting story, but I had a hard time really immersing myself in the story.

Really powerful novel about a young woman trying to survive in a country that doesn't seem to want her there. Loved the details about Turkey, the coup attempt, the political situation, etc.

Since this was a shorter book I jumped on it to have a good time. But, sadly, that story didn't stick with me. I read (actually listen through the audiobook) 32% way through and I didn't find any character dynamic, plot or any kind of interesting event that grabbed my attention. So, I decided to DNF this book.

The story was built around an immigrant Turkish student who lives in Berlin and who starts as a janitor when she loses her scholarship to the university. She is involved in all sorts of drug usage and doesn't have any real friends and has a complicated relationship with her family. She tries hard to turn things around for her future but fails to stick to it up to the point I read. The narrator, unfortunately, wasn't making any interesting either to me and the character felt like 2 dimensions. However, the violent environment in her country described here kept reminding me of the war in Ukraine but it wasn't the same kind of setting. Overall I didn't feel this character was a real one and was too fast phased for my liking while nothing happened in the storyline. So if I were to give this one a rating that would be 1 start since 32% is more than enough to keep my attention.

audiobook
This was depressing and I think it was supposed to be. I was intrigued by the story of an international graduate student living in Germany. Her professor did not want to award her diploma for some reason. Graduate school can be very frustrating and uncertain. I could relate to this part of the story. However, the young woman's life was a mess. She had a demeaning job, was into drugs, and spouted a lot of depressing philosophy. Her family life in Turkiye, her home country, was also a disaster. I was glad when she met The Swede. I felt sorry for this woman and wanted some nice guy to sweep her off her feet.
The writing and character development were good. It was a heavy story that I could not listen to every day. I had to take a break because it really was sad. If that was the author's objective, she definitely achieved it. Readers who like dark, introspective fiction may enjoy this more than I did.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Another book with an unlikeable character. I very much wanted to root for Leyla. But time and time again, this book took me in a direction that I wasn’t expecting. This book gave me major Sally Rooney vibes, but not in a good way.

Leyla claims she wants to be a writer, but she doesn’t do anything to get herself there. She continually finds reasons NOT to pursue her supposed dream career, all while wasting her small income on drugs and alcohol. Instead, it is her friends who help her out and encourage her.

She consciously chooses to spend her small sum of money in escapism. Leyla effectively just hopes for the best and doesn’t plan for the future in any way, and it was a tough for me to continue to read about someone wasting their life partying, all the while complaining about her circumstances.

I couldn’t figure out why the Swede likes her. It doesn’t seem like she offers him anything based on what is presented in the book. To put it bluntly, he’s too good for her, and I feel that she was taking advantage of his good nature.

In the end, I couldn’t reconcile the person that Leyla is in the book, which made this book an automatic failure for me.

I listened to this one about 50% through before deciding it wasn't for me. I just felt like it was too slow and not enough was happening to keep me going.

“Memory is fiction constantly rewriting itself.” Layla is a self-described “Turkish runaway in her twenties who came to Berlin to be free but can’t bring herself to write a book that would expose the world for what it is.” “I stayed up until 5:00 a.m. transcribing my life in fragments. I saved the document as ‘The Applicant,’” inspired by Sylvia Plath’s poem by the same name. In an attempt at coming clean, “I became so good at sweeping away that life, it turned me into a professional cleaner.”

Leyla finds a job as a maid at an Alice in Wonderland themed hostel. “Little do they know, not only their Wonderland but the whole world is infested with bedbugs. The Mad Hatter is underpaid, the Cat is overworked, and Alice’s visa is running out.” However, Leyla discovers, “It’s not up to the Turkish cleaner on a visa to overcome all obstacles between herself and what she desires. It’s up to…officers, court clerks, and university professors…And they won’t because they’re the cleaners of their own stories, and clearly they’re better heroines…How seamlessly they shake off the unruly student from their perfect institutions, rinse the country off the defeated, send the unworthy down the sink. They’re naturals at this.”

Leyla exposes and expunges the physical and metaphorical dirt of racism, sexism, and ethnocentrism with the power of her pen. “I turned my fear into guilt, shame, and secrets, split it into small pieces. I made invisible weapons of self-destruction out of each one and placed them in every corner of my room. I know now that my weapons never stood a chance against death or life.

“It’s time to stop capturing ghosts with bottles of wine and making their curses mine. It’s time to put my laptop screen down and face the mirror–without the Looking Glass cleaning supplies. It’s time to get past the stains and look into my own eyes, no matter how scared they are…This time, I will take my story with me, all of it, as I write on the pages of this ugly notebook I’ve come to love.”

Nazli Koca’s The Applicant is a literary tapestry interweaving the cultural threads of Turkey, Germany, Cuba, France, Sweden, and the US. It’s an imperative novel in light of national disasters and global disparities of race, language, gender, as we find ourselves “perpetually trying to put together broken pieces.”

Highly readable and clearly written! I had such high hopes for this novel as I sped through it, and for the career of this fine, new writer. But without belaboring the point, I will just say that the end was a let down, and then some. Nevertheless, I will look forward to and read Koca's next book because of the spark of promise shining through this one... until the very end.

I listened to this book on audiobook on a long drive. The story is about an Turkish woman who lives in Berlin to study writing. When her thesis is rejected, she has to re-examine her life. Should she return to her bankrupt family or marry her Swedish boyfriend. Her writing reminds me a lot of Elif Bautman if Elif did ketamine.

I am so thankful that I was able to read this book and do continually thank Nazli Koca, RB Media, and NetGalley for the advanced access. Everyone loves a cozy mystery, especially when there's some historical fiction thrown in the pot.

Thank you to the author Nazli Koca, publishers RB Media, and as always NetGalley, for an advance audio copy of THE APPLICANT.

Leyla is a young Turkish twenty something should-be-post-grad living in Germany, who suddenly finds herself cut off from her expected source of academic funds when her thesis advisor flunks her thesis. It's unheard of at her German university, but here she finds herself, involved in a lawsuit, trying to obtain her degree. Trying to salvage all that work. But also, she needs food, and a place to sleep. She can't return to Turkey. And her relatives can't help her, can't help themselves, or anyone. She needs a job. So she goes to work, at first cleaning rooms in a hostel. Soon, she figures that a job is a job. Since she needs the money to survive, being prudish or moralistic about how to earn goes beyond illogical. So, she works and parties a great deal, always circling back to her journal, where she writes the entries that let the reader into her life.

The narravative voice in THE APPLICANT is just exactly as compelling as the audiobook narrator is tense and boring. I can tell this book is written in a voice that would just pull the reader along, but unfortunately the audiobook reader read every sentence in the same high-strung inflection-- as though she was reading an edge-of-the-seat action sequence when she is actually reading diary entries. The form demands a more nuanced performance. I don't recommend the audiobook.

My favorite thing about this book is that Koca uses Leyla's wonderful voice to posit some radical ideas about work that are fascinating to consider in the safe fictional framing. She discusses the moralistics of prostitution at one point; also the ethics and usefulness of firing employees who break rules if they benefit the business in other ways. Leyla spends a great deal of time considering such inquiries, but in terms of character development, this time results mostly in lateral gains. From start to finish, none of the characters change much, and none of the book's conflicts resolve much.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5 / 5 stars
Recommend? Yes, it was interesting
Finished: March 03 2023
Read this if you like:
📖 Diary entries
🧑‍💻 Stories about work
🌍 Immigrant stories
👧🏽 Strong female voices

Very unique and intersting storyline with fascinatingly complex and flawed characters. I really enjoy these slice of life stories that leave you hanging on every word. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy.

I have to admit that I love a good twisty psychological thriller, and this one really hit the spot. And that ending! Highly recommend

The Applicant by Nazli Koca Narrated by Günes Sensoy was a audiobook I did struggled with......At the beginning and then wanted to find out what happens to the main character Leyla.

Leyla is a Turkish twenty-something living in Berlin in 2017, and is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland-themed hostel after failing her thesis, losing her student visa, and suing her German university in a Kafkaesque attempt to reverse her failure.

What else can go wrong!?

Leyla never gives up and attempts to find happiness and contentment in a life that was never supposed to be hers.

The Applicant is a debut novel, it's well written, with dark humour woven into it. This book will open your eyes into the life of an immigrant woman and the struggles she may face daily.
I found it very educational and enlightening. I learned a great deal

Thank you NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to NetGalley and Recorded Books for the audiobook ARC!

The Applicant is an interesting look at what it really means to be a stranger in a strange land. The protagonist's experiences in Germany and Sweden are, I'm sure, a familiar refrain for many who find themselves displaced, whether by choice or otherwise. An interesting book.