Orhan Pamuk

Winner of the 1990 Independent Award for foreign fiction, this book tells the story of a young Italian scholar who is captured by pirates. Put up for auction at the Istanbul slave market, he is bought by a Turkish servant, eager to learn about scientific and intellectual advances in the West.

The White Castle

Maurice FitzGerald

started to annoy me about 3/4 of the way through. Not sure if it was the audio-book narrator or the continued references to this or that person who was just like me or not like me. It reads like an allegorical novel without much depth.

Richu A Kuttikattu

maryam

heleen de boever

Oguzhan Cakmak

Servi

Onur Karacali

azer

Nimish

Deniz Erkaradağ

Ayşegül Pembeci

Tahsin Ates

From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Joyce, Nabokov, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez comes a dazzling novel set in the Ottoman Empire, at once a captivating work of historical fiction and a sinuous treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West. In the 17th century, a young man sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner by pirates and delivered to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople. There he is forced into slavery and left in the custody of a brilliant Turkish inventor known as Hoja--"master"--a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities. Set in the Ottoman Empire, a world of pirates, slavery, magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a colourful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination.

The White Castle

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