Orhan Pamuk

"Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karataş has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he'd hoped, at the age of twelve he comes to Istanbul -- "the center of the world" -- and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father's trade, selling boza (a traditional mildly alcoholic Turkish drink) on the...

"On the outskirts of a town thirty miles from Istanbul a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before, not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend...

A portrait, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's great cities, by its foremost man of letters. Blending reminiscence with history; family photographs with portraits of poets and pashas; art criticism, metaphysical musing, and, now and again, a fanciful tale, Pamuk invents an ingenious form to evoke his lifelong home, the city that forged his imagination. He begins with his childhood, his first intimations of the melancholy awareness...

In the middle of winter, a poet and journalist travels to the remote city of Kars, on the border of Turkey, after many years of political exile in Western Europe. "En pleno invierno, un poeta y periodista viaja a la remota ciudad de Kars, en la frontera de Turquía, después de largos años de exilio político en Europa occidental"-- Back cover.

This is the moving story of a family gathering at a crumbling mansion the summer before the Turkish military coup of 1980.