Author(s): Orhan Pamuk

Novel | Historical | Translated fiction | Turkey / Türkiye

A new book by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Part detective story, part historical epic - a bold and brilliant novel that imagines a plague taking over a fictional island in the Ottoman Empire.

It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingeria-the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire-located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives-brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca, or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria-the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island-an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader, Sheikh H, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And the sultan's expert is murdered.

As the plague continues its rapid spread, the sultan sends a second doctor to the island, this time a Muslim, and strict quarantine measures are declared. But the incompetence of the island's governor and local administration and the people's refusal to respect the bans dooms the quarantine to failure, and the death count continues to rise. Faced with the danger that the plague might spread to the West and to Istanbul, the sultan bows to international pressure and allows foreign and Ottoman warships to blockade the island. Now the people of Mingeria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves.

Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is an epic story set more than one hundred years ago with themes that feel remarkably contemporary.

Review: "Pamuk's prose is as elegant and informed as ever. . . . [His] storytelling is so compelling and coy; his intelligence and interests so wide-ranging . . . there is a great deal here to savor." -Kirkus Reviews

"Masterfully imagined and relentlessly inventive . . . [Nights of Plague] is a complex and intriguing amalgam of form and genre. . . . [A] fascinating . . . and, dare I say, oddly timeless book, although Pamuk clearly has an eye on the present." -Air Mail

"A novelist for the post-truth age. . . . Pamuk is able to pose timely questions about the nature of the state. . . . How do we know a legitimate government from a dictatorship? Pamuk has built a maze around the answer, and that's an answer in itself." -The Atlantic

"Engrossing. . . . Pamuk's lovingly obsessive creation of the invented Mediterranean island of Mingheria [is] a world so detailed, so magically full, so introverted and personal in emphasis, that it shimmers like a memory palace. . . . The effect is daringly vertiginous, at once floatingly postmodern and solidly realistic. . . . [Nights of Plague is] a big but swift novel, a novel about pain and death that is fundamentally light and buoyant." -James Wood, The New Yorker

"Nights of Plague might pass for an old-fashioned, detail-rich, Tolstoyian epic. . . . Pamuk's delight in art and artifice is inextricable from his realistic accounts of . . . political intrigue, cultural and religious enmity, gender inequity, and medical futility." -The New York Times

"Taking great care on the description of the eastern Mediterranean's landscapes and the material culture and politics of the late Ottoman period . . . Nights of Plague displays [Pamuk's] full powers." -The New York Sun

"Scintillating. . . . By the end of this long book the artist's alchemy has taken effect and readers may find themselves in that immeasurably strange and deeply cherished condition of being swept away by events they know perfectly well never happened." -The Wall Street Journal

Author Biography: ORHAN PAMUK won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. His novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than sixty languages. He lives in Istanbul.