'The Four Humors' by Alumna Mina Seçkin '18 (CC '15) to Release in November

The Four Humors, a debut novel by fiction alumna Mina Seçkin '18 (CC '15), will be released by Catapult on November 9, 2021.

The novel follows twenty-year-old Sibel as she travels to Istanbul to help care for her ailing grandmother. While in Turkey, instead of studying for her MCATs and grieving the unexpected loss of her father, Sibel becomes obsessed with the ancient medical theory of the four humors, using it to self-diagnose a possible chronic illness. All the while, Sibel is also dealing with her family's history in the context of Turkey's cultural and political narrative, and comes to discover that her grandmother holds a terrible secret. 

The Four Humors has already received attention from several Columbia faculty and alumni. According to Professor Binnie Kirshenbaum, "Set in a stunning evocation of contemporary Turkey, The Four Humors is spellbinding. With sensitivity and insight...Seçkin weaves the entanglements of romantic love and the complexities of familial love throughout this exploration of cultural identity. This debut novel is one for our time." 

Alumna Jean Kyoung Frazier '18, author of Pizza Girl, called the novel "Soulful and tender, honest, but never cruel. The Four Humors is a debut that doesn't feel like a debut. With the wisdom of a writer beyond her years...Seçkin has crafted a novel that delicately and lyrically explores the body and everything it holds—the blood, phlegm, bile, choler, all the bodily fluids and memories and generational trauma, the joy that we keep moving and breathing despite it—everything that makes us the flawed, beautiful humans that we are." 

Mina Seçkin is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She serves as managing editor of Apogee Journal