Blood Tie

Settle's American and European expatriates wintering in the Turkish coastal town of Ceramos bring with them the standard vacationer's conviction that a beautiful, unfamiliar place exists mainly as a setting for their own small dramas — love affairs, rivalries, archaeological hobbies — while the country's actual political tensions, building toward real unrest, register to them as ambience rather than danger. Settle structures the novel to correct that misreading from the outside: the book moves, as she put it, from accidental death to deliberate murder, and the shift makes clear that the expatriates' obliviousness was never harmless. It has been generating real consequences, borne mostly by the Turkish characters around them, all along.

The novel resists the reassurance, common to expatriate fiction in this vein, that foreign presence in someone else's country is ultimately neutral or benign. Local Turkish characters absorb the actual costs of the visitors' carelessness and self-absorption, and Settle refuses her American and European characters the comfortable ending where they simply go home changed but essentially unscathed — complicity here has a body count, and it isn't evenly distributed between the people who came to enjoy the place and the people who have always had to live in it.

Settle lived in Turkey for years and later wrote Turkish Reflections, a nonfiction account of her time there, and that lived engagement separates Blood Tie from the more familiar tradition of American and European novels that use an exotic setting purely as atmosphere. She takes contemporary Turkish politics and daily life seriously as subject matter in their own right, not just as pressure bearing down on visiting Westerners, which is part of why the novel reads as a rebuke of its own expatriate characters' incuriosity rather than a shared indulgence in it.

The wide, almost overpopulated cast — accountants, an heiress, divers, archaeologists — lets Settle stage her argument from multiple angles at once rather than through a single obviously culpable villain; the novel's real target is a collective posture, not one bad actor. That structural choice is part of what won it the National Book Award: reviewers at the time singled out Settle's refusal to let any single expatriate character absorb all the blame, insisting instead that the whole visiting community's casual self-absorption was complicit in what the town eventually suffers.