9.75 Square Centimetres

In his most recent novel, 9.75 Santimetrekare (2014, 9.75 Square Centimetres), Eroğlu tells the story of Ahmet, whose father killed his mother with a broken bottle by cutting her carotid when Ahmet was two years old. At the time his mother tried to use Ahmet, who was sitting on her lap, as a shield, leaving the boy with a scar on his face, crossing from the end of his lips up to his temple, which has grown to cover an area of 9.75 square centimetres. Throughout the novel, Ahmet tries to find an answer as to why his mother chose to try to protect herself instead of saving her child. When his father is killed in jail, he becomes a parentless child and is raised in an orphanage; he is not adopted because of his scar, which becomes not only a reminder of his traumatic past but also a marker of his loneliness. Later on, he grows a beard to cover his scar, but even when he has the money to remove the scar that covers half his face, he does not, as he thinks that it bears the most valuable things in his life: his sufferings and his past, his memory and identity.

As an adult Ahmet lives in Cihangir, a neighbourhood close to the Gezi Park where the resistance that ignited the Gezi protests started in 2013. His downstairs neighbour Marilyn (given name Erol), a transsexual and a member of LGBT, attends the protests and hosts her friends she meets there at her home. With the Gezi Park protests at the background, Eroğlu focuses on the suffering lonely Ahmet, who is trying to write the life of a Kurdish child, Zinar, whom he met in 1993 while fighting in the Gabar Mountains as a soldier. Throughout the novel, Ahmet tries to finish his novel about this Kurdish boy, but because of a ten-minute gap in his memory, he cannot. This brief gap in time occurred when Ahmet went on an operation with his team and clashed with a group of guerrillas in a mountain village.