The novel opens with the inner voice of Kadir, a writer on exile, who is “happy to be on the unchanged side of the world, having dreams that grace the future and not to give up.”

“Being obliged to decide where and what you belong to in a time when the old is shattered and not replaced!” And making this choice when you’re suffering from love! The sad story of Kadir’s - who can be considered as the representative of a generation that shaped their lives in the command of their hearts in the 1970s when they were in their early twenties- in a period of twenty years later when socialism lost ground in the world; Exile of the Heart is first and foremost a novel of romance. On one side is a 42-year-old writer who can offer to the woman he loves nothing but a turbulent future to be lived only by heart, and on the other side is Ayţe, who’s expecting Kadir to give up being himself and promise her a simple, peaceful life and future; and around this love is the panorama of the intermingled lives of a few people trying to hold on to their crumpled lives: Lale, who is a lonely woman trying to support her son who’s getting closer to death every day in a hunger strike in prison while waiting for her husband -  Murat - to come back from Germany where he’s been living as a political refugee for years; Halit, who stops having hopes for the revolution and unites his fight with radical Islamic movement saying, “If that’s what it takes, I can bear the holiness of God for the happiness of mankind”; Nihat, who gave up on his ideals by abandoning his friends twenty years ago and attempted to buy the respect of his old friends using the fortune he made later on; Murat, -not being able to bear loneliness- who seeks salvation in people that know how to be happy, during his extended exile in Germany… Meanwhile, the secret about Hamparsum’s – one of the missing masters of Classical Turkish Music – compositions which evokes Kadir’s childhood nightmares to life and develops around the Ottoman Dynasty-related Mr Ebuziya forms the sub-story of the novel.

Exile of the Heart is a work that in a way stands as a turn-point to Mehmet Erođlu’s first four novels through which he explores young activists asking dangerous questions to them selves. Young men who lived with the dream of revolution before the 1970s are now in their forties. They try to stand out against the life they’re not accustomed to like a group of endangered species, in a time when no dreams of revolution do exist – with the losses they had after the two military coups d’etat and the ones left over from the ones who couldn’t be able to bear the pressure and suffering - Another convulsive and significant thing about the book is that Mehmet Erođlu’s prophecy-like political prevision in the early 1990s regarding the coming ten years of the country. It’s important to note that he did this while political Islam was yet not in power and the signs of violent madness in the radical Islamic movement to reveal itself in the year 2000 was yet inexistent. While Erođlu unfolds – through Halit, one of the most significant characters in the novel - who will fill up the empty place remained from the left-wing in the political arena, and how they will do it, Exile of the Heart studies the Muslim-Secular line which divides our society seriously, through the eyes of a Muslim woman, Zehra.

The novel ends, just like the way it started, with the mutters of Kadir who has got back from the exile in his heart: “I’m forty-two, I haven’t given up dreaming that will grace the world, and I never will…”