The Old Man's Draft

About this book

"It is a kind of folly to measure ages by numbers of lying years.."; with these words the work raises its curtain to take us into the worlds of Layl, the child whom destiny granted no chance to live his childhood, but threw on his shoulders elders' dignity and men's concerns before his time. The story begins with a stifled scream in the stairwell's darkness, where Layl faces "the Man" with the green turban, turning his life from a mere child helping his little siblings into a "father" by coercion and a patient of delusion. Between the absent expatriate father's chasing of the decent-life dream in America, and the mother's fear turning into a silent crime against her eldest son, human-drama threads tangle. "The Old Man's Draft" is no mere novel about loss, but a painful dissection of kinship relations when they lose their way, and how a "pill" can be a prison stripping one of his reality to hurl him into hallucination's abyss, pleasing cross-continent societies or seeking false safety. The novel progresses through secret meetings, fractured memories, and Layl's struggle to distinguish imposed delusion from his own reality.