In the dim light of the street lamps, you have a book full of stories as ordinary as a coffee shop apprentice’s movement while wiping the glass, but as profound as they are: Neighborhood Coffee House.

Sait Faik does not pursue great stories in this book. His world is hidden in the eyes of an old man waiting at the corner grocery store, in the sigh of a young man who puts out his cigarette while looking at the sea. Sentences that begin with a cup of coffee take us to the simplest, most fragile state of human beings.

In these stories, laughter is loud, but there is always something missing; there is joy, but it aches inside. Because Sait Faik knows that the deepest feelings of human beings are not hidden in crowds, but in the silence of a neighborhood café.

“It all starts with loving a person,” the author once said, and that love is here, in these streets, in this café, in these stories.

Mahalle Kahvesi is one of the rare books in which the greatest master of storytelling in our literature shows the extraordinary in the ordinary, gently divides life into pieces and teaches us to love each one separately. As you turn the pages, you will recognize the sounds, smells and faces of a neighborhood; perhaps you will find yourself sitting on an old wooden chair, coffee in hand, looking out the window.

Because this book is a map of the human heart, not a neighborhood.