“Sooner or later ... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”  Mehmet Erođlu’s eighth novel starts with this quotation from Graham Greene. The basic question The Vomit Club poses is about this basic choice made by a person. Until when are we going to put up with the injustices and inequities before us as human beings? The novel, just like the question asked through a letter in the beginning of the book, is an answer to the question of what we are going to do with our conscience.

Umut defines his life, which he spent playing always secondary roles, as “getting used to my misery.” The night he loses all hopes of clinging to Istanbul, where threw him out of its womb at least three times like a dead fetus, he meets Nihan. This young and extremely brilliant cryptologist, who has participated in the Math Olympics, is the head of an extraordinary gang formed by of intellectual and clever people. In return for a job that will allow him to continue living in the city that keeps rejecting him, Umut accepts to be the bait of the gang to deliver their enemy named ‘The Ghost’. Our hero, who has settled for small roles bestow him by God all through his life, suddenly finds himself in the world of the so-called high society. But Umut’s adventure in this festive and colorful world is soon to turn into a sad journey. During his journey, full of surprises, he finds out that one is capable of showing pity to others once one stops feeling sorry for one self and that of the violence is at times the basis of justice and laws. And eventually, by reaching a new world where a humane God (that knows how to pity) rules, he meets that great fact meets with that eminent fact about himself…

 On one side magazine queens, young women ready to do whatever it takes to make their names known, the media which wants to claim an important role in the country’s destiny, giving itself a divine and immune position, dishonest business men; on the other side, a lunatic philosopher who falls in love with a young woman instead of confine himself to growing old, a southeast veteran with perfect hearing ability, a convict who lost his memory due to a hunger strike, a blind man the police cannot blind whatever they do, and a handicapped man with a big heart. The disenchanted ones looking for their own heaven! The divided heroes of a divided city…

In The Vomit Club, the foremost writer, Mehmet Erođlu, who has created himself a crowd of readers (who say “That’s my writer!”) with his previous novels, mercilessly criticizes “prosperity” - which he says is “the most dangerous illness on earth that should be eradicated” -, the established system, the media and the magazine world. Then, setting off from these criticisms, with a finesse of writing he generates a virtue that is what most makes us human - “our conscience; the god of our passions” – into a literary theme.