World War I constituted a major historical rupture that accelerated the military, political and social dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and has been represented not only in historiography but also in literary narratives. One of the writers who addressed this global war is the Republican-era author Selma Fındıklı. This article examines the representation of World War I in her novels Saray Meydanı’nda Son Gece, Vardar Rüzgârı, Nereye Yüreğim and Kum Gülü. Through a thematic close reading informed by historical context, the study analyzes how these novels narrate the front, the home front, military deprivation, political authority, Ottoman-German relations, desertion, and different social communities. In Fındıklı’s fiction, war appears not merely as a military conflict but as a multilayered historical experience that exposes imperial dissolution, individual trauma, social fragmentation, and political responsibility. The article argues that Fındıklı’s novels reinterpret World War I through the intersecting lenses of historical critique and social suffering.
World War I, Selma Fındıklı, historical novel, Ottoman Empire, literature, history.