The New Life

"His novels erudite, formally experimental yet compulsively readable have won him international esteem."

The New York Times Magazine

"I read a book one day , and my whole life was changed." With these words, the protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's fiendishly engaging novel is launched into a world of hypnotic texts and (literally) Byzantine conspiracies that whirl across the steppes and forlorn frontier towns of Turkey. And with The New Life, Pamuk himself vaulted from the forefront of his country 's writers into the arena of world literature introducing American readers to a sensibility as erudite as Nabokov's and as chillingly prophetic as J.G. Ballard's.

Through teh simple act of reading a book, a young student is uprooted from his old life and identity. Within days he has fallen in love with the luminous and elusive Janan; Witnessed the attempted assasination of a rival suitorand forsaken his family to travel aimlessly through a nocturnal landscape of traveler's cafes and apocalyptic bus wrecks. As imagined by Pamuk, the result is a wondrous marriage of the intellectual thriller and hing romance.