Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award

One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2024

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice

A New Yorker, TIME, Publishers Weekly, Vanity Fair, ELLE, Electric Literature, Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2024

New York Magazine/Vulture #1 Book of 2024

A Dakota Johnson x Tea Time Productions Book Club Pick

“Utterly enchanting… Even the most humdrum events resonate with importance when viewed through Savas’s meticulous and layered prose and plotting. Her storytelling is subtle but deliberate…The ordinary moments contain multitudes, the novel seems to say … Savas has invited us to praise the unremarkable grace of Asya and Manu’s lives, and in the process, to pause and appreciate the beautiful textures of our own.”– New York Times Book Review

“An erudite and elegant meditation on modern life and modern love… Don’t be deceived by Savaş’s cool, matter-of-fact tone – beneath it lie layers of wisdom, delicacy and subtlety... [she] has created something remarkable.” - The Guardian

“A meticulous chronicle of circumspection, a knowing assessment of the motions we go through in cities, and a portrait of aspiration... I found myself not wanting THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS to end.” -Financial Times

“Subtle and resonant” - The New Yorker

“It is a novel that takes as its subject the texture, routines, and rituals of a particular lifestyle—itinerant and youthful, or at least untethered by children—and serves as sort of a field guide to its participants … One of the book’s strengths lies in Savaş’s ability to capture the experience of life as an outsider in a new place … Savaş approaches her novel with a keen awareness of the reality through which it crafts and filters its make-believe.”-Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic

“A romance, an immigration story, and an open-hearted manual for living” - New York Magazine

“An engrossing, perceptive, and elegantly philosophical novel about the practice of paying close attention” - Cara Blue Adams, The Baffler

“There are no explosions or battle scenes in this subtle novel, just an appreciation of the value and marvels of living a life that is your own. Perfectly perceptive.”-Kirkus (starred review)

“It’s a masterpiece.”-Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

“Yet another gorgeous, gorgeous book from Aysegül Savaş: she is an author who simply, and astoundingly, knows. Savaş knows hope. Savaş knows despair. Savaş knows joy, and malaise, and laughter and curiosity. There are worlds inside of Savaş’s prose, and The Anthropologists is both a bright light and a map for how to be. A massively heartening achievement.”-Bryan Washington

The Anthropologists is about love, youth, and that most profound and elusive of subjects – happiness. Full of delicacy, wisdom and wit, this is another gorgeous work from one of my favorite writers. -Katie Kitamura

“Like Walter Benjamin, Ayşegül Savaş uncovers trapdoors to bewilderment everywhere in everyday life like Henry James, she sees marriage as a mystery, unsoundably deep. The Anthropologists is mesmerising; I felt I read it in a single breath.” -Garth Greenwell

“Savaş’s prose is an X-ray—an acute portrait of the tender frequencies that make a life.” -Raven Leilani