The novel is a story about three generations of women in an Istanbul family and reveals different aspects of Turkey’s past and present. At the center of the story is Asya, an angry nineteen-year-old girl who listens to Johnny Cash and reads French existentialists, the “bankrupt” of the novel’s title. She lives in Istanbul with her mother, three aunts, and her grandmother and great-grandmother. The male members of the family never live to a ripe old age. The only living representative – Asya’s uncle Mustafa – stayed in America after his studies. Through his nineteen-year-old stepdaughter Armanoush, an Armenian family that fled the Turkish genocide in 1915 enters the novel. It turns out that the two families are more connected than they seem at first glance.