The first volume of a trilogy called "Beyond the Mountain", which describes the Yalak villagers, who come down from the Taurus mountains each year to pick cotton on the hot Chukurova plain.

After a particularly bad season, a group of poor cotton-pickers are unable to pay their creditor, shopkeeper Adil Effendi. Overwhelmed with shame and guilt, they wait in terror for Adil to come and demand retribution. But when he inexplicably fails to appear, Adil begins to represent an irrational and tyrannical force, growing in their minds until they become sick with apprehension and obsessed with the terrible disaster that is sure to come upon them. In their despair they turn to Tashbash, a brave, decent and loyal man, investing him with virtue, grace and miraculous power. But the cotton-pickers have no idea of the effect of their idolatry on Tashbash, with his innocent doubts and mental torment, until his fate finally befalls him and the novel draws to its apposite close. Written with deep compassion and lyrical beauty, this is a novel alive with the acute observation of human nature.

In "The Wind From the Plain Trilogy", acclaimed Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal uses his powerful skills as a storyteller to conjure a vanishing way of life. In rich, lyrical prose, Kemal's epic of rural Turkey portrays a country and a people uneasily poised between tradition and modernity, between East and West. Each novel follows his protagonists as they struggle to survive in this changing world without losing the traditions and values that define them as a people. The daily struggles draw us into a vibrant culture that is rarely represented for Western readers, but nevertheless evokes universal themes of family, work, suffering, and mortality. Long considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kemal has created in his depiction of Cukurova what William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez envisioned in their dreamworlds of Yoknapatawpha County and Macondo. A student of oral tradition as well as of Cervantes, Stendhal, and Chekhov, Kemal creates legends born of his own experience. Through Thilda Kemal's skilled translation, the titles that comprise this triology - "The Wind from the Plain"; "Iron Earth", "Copper Sky"; and, "The Undying Grass" - will now reach an English-language audience in one comprehensive edition for the first time.