This paper will explore Fatih Akin's use of literature in "The Edge of Heaven" both as a leitmotiv that identifies the social and personal problems that the movie addresses, and as a solution to them. These problems cover the whole gamut from poverty, prostitution, immigration, sexual and gender identity, the generational conflict to Kurdish and Islamist politics. The imaginative and generative locus of the movie that counters these is a bookstore in Istanbul. The movie seems to suggest that solution to these problems will come through the ideas that books and movies spread, through the understanding they make possible. The most important work circulating the movie is the German-Turkish novelist Selim Ozdogan’s book “Demircinin Kizi/The Ironsmith’s Daughter,” a typical Turkish melodrama that adapts the form to the needs and problems of a first generation German-Turkish experience. In the opening scenes of Akin’s movie, a son gives it to his father to read, and by the end, the resolution of the moral conflict between them is made possible by the father’s experience of reading it. His emotional response to the book as we see him finish and close it at the very end proves that he is a changed man who can be forgiven. By foregrounding this act of reading and the positive changes it makes possible, Akin takes a political stance for the resolution of social conflicts through education and communication. This message is strengthened through lectures on Goethe’s idea of organic development, delivered by the same son at the university. A detective working on the case of Kurdish separatists also comes back to stressing education as a solution. That this is revolutionary and not a cop-out to preserve the status quo, is signaled through the use of Nazim Hikmet as one of the authors to be read. Akin is suggesting that a reading, enlightened citizenry will look for other means of solving problems than violence, which just perpetuates the same vicious cycle of death. Akin’s strategic placement of the novel both at the beginning and the end paces his movie, and turns it to a metaphoric book jacket for the novel. Akin uses the book not only as a symbol of communication and transformation that is experienced, but as a means to structure his movie and announce his formal kinship with the novel as a parallel variation on the Turkish melodrama, but this time in film.