Description

A novel of profound relevance to the present moment.
The Times
As the snow begins to fall, a journalist arrives in the remote city of Kars on the Turkish border. The city he finds is a troubled place there’s a suicide epidemic among its young women, Islamists are
poised to win the local elections, and the head of the intelligence service is viciously effective. Soon the growing blizzard cuts off the outside world and the stage is set for a terrible and desperate act…
Orhan Pamuk’s magnificent and controversial new novel evokes the spiritual fragility of the nonWestern world, its ambivalence about the godless West, and its fury.
‘Profound and frequently brilliant… Illuminate[s] the confrontation between secular and extremist Islamic worlds better than any work of non-fiction I can think of’
New Statesman
A gripping political thriller … Pamuk keeps so many balls in the air that you cannot separate the inquiry into the nature of religious belief from the examination of modern Turkey, the investigation of East-West relations, and the nature of art itself.
Spectator