Some love stories are built around invented settings. The Keeper of the Light is built around a real one, and knowing the geography changes how the book reads.
Rumeli Feneri sits at the European mouth of the Bosphorus, exactly where the strait pours into the Black Sea, in the Sarıyer district of Istanbul. Built by the French during the Crimean War in the 1850s, it stands roughly thirty meters tall on a headland and remains, to this day, the tallest lighthouse in Turkey, visible some eighteen nautical miles out to sea. It is a real, still-operating structure, maintained now by Turkey's Coastal Safety Authority, and it is where Emre Demir, the book's lighthouse keeper, lives and works. Directly across the water, on the Asian side in Beykoz, stands its twin: Anadolu Feneri, in continuous service since 1856, with a keeper's house that is, in reality, still lived in by a family today. In the novel, that second lighthouse becomes the setting for a quiet, dangerous crossing partway through the story, and the geography does real narrative work: two lighthouses facing each other across a strait, one on each continent, standing in for two people who are not supposed to be able to reach each other at all.
The book leans into a detail most readers will not know going in: within the grounds of Rumeli Feneri sits the tomb of Sarı Saltuk, a revered figure honored across faiths in the region. Emre tends it out of habit and a private kind of penance, and it becomes, over the course of the story, a place where two people from different religious traditions find a shared kind of reverence rather than a dividing line. It is a real site, treated in the book with the respect it is actually held in by the communities around it.
On the other side of the water the book crosses is Georgia, and specifically the Black Sea coastal city of Batumi, home to Mariam Beridze, the marine biologist at the center of the novel's other point of view. Her research into the Black Sea's disappearing dolphins and anchovy is grounded in a real and ongoing environmental story, one that gives the romance an unusual second layer: a sea that is dying, being watched over by two people who are, in their own way, trying to keep something alive against the odds. Mariam is also written as a singer of Georgian polyphony, a real and distinctive vocal tradition in which three voices are woven into a single chord rather than sung in simple harmony. In the novel it becomes a recurring image for the relationship itself: two very different voices, and eventually a third, braided into something that could not exist as one voice alone.
None of this turns The Keeper of the Light into a travelogue. It is very much a novel, with invented characters and an invented plot, built around real coordinates rather than a real incident. But the specificity is part of why the book earns its emotional moments rather than borrowing them. A storm that nearly took Emre's brother a decade earlier, echoed by a second storm at the book's climax, means more because both storms are happening in a place that genuinely produces storms like that. A lighthouse that is built, historically and literally, to warn ships away becomes a far richer symbol once a reader understands that the same beam, aimed a different way, has always also been the thing that tells a sailor exactly where home is.
The Keeper of the Light is available now on the books page, alongside the rest of the Love Without Borders series.