Tezer Özlü (1943-1986), a "miscategorized" author of Turkish literature, broke every rule imposed on her through her writing. The Journey to the Edge of Life, at the time of its release, was described as a book unprecedented in the Turkish language. The author is still called in Turkey "the sad princess of Turkish literature," thus continuing the incomplete understanding of her work within a highly patriarchal society and essentially hiding her revolutionary, incompatible, and uncompromising stance, as well as the joy of life that is constantly in dialectical relationship with death within her work.

The same dialectic is the relationship of Tezer Özlü with her "own" authors Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka, and Cesare Pavese, whose footsteps she follows in the journey she records in this book. It is fortunate that forty years after Tezer Özlü's short life, her work is read and inspires new generations of readers, is studied, and translated. The collection of her short stories Old Garden – Old Love is also published by Tsoukatos Editions.

One single day I spent in Prague is much denser than many periods of the rest of my life. For the first time, in two days I manage to write in such a way the words that were accumulated inside me. Until now I kept the images deep inside, in my darkness, unable to transform them into words, only allowing them to torment me [...] With them I lived, with them I loved or thought I loved, but maybe it is not true, neither did I love nor did I live. Only caught some traces of both. I kept the images buried deep in my darkness. And now I am overwhelmed by the chimera of these images.

The Journey to the Edge of Life is the swan song of an author who lived and wrote fearlessly, inviting us who read her into a dialogue with herself but also with ourselves.