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From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Joyce, Nabokov, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez comes a dazzling novel that is 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.
About the author
Orhan Pamuk is the author of many celebrated books of fiction, nonfiction, and photography. In 2003 he won the IMPAC prize for My Name is Red, and in 2006 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.Victoria Rowe Holbrook is a graduate of Harvard and Princeton and a member of the Columbia University Society of Fellows. She has taught at Columbia, Ohio State as a tenured Associate Professor, Bosphorus, Koç, Bilkent, and most recently Istanbul Bilgi University. She is the author of The Unreadable Shores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance, articles bridging literature, philosophy, and religious thought, and several translations from Turkish and Persian, including Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle, Nurdan Gürbilek's The New Cultural Climate in Turkey: Living in a Shop Window, the Ottoman verse romance Beauty and Love by Galip, and a commentary on Rumi's Spiritual Couplets by Kenan Rifai She is working on a book about Platonism in the rest of the world.
Summary
Winner of the Nobel Prize for LiteratureWinner of the Independent Award for Foreign Fiction'Turkey's foremost novelist .
