Snow

A one of the ISBN 9780375706868's many covers.

The winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature tells a captivating story of conflicting desires for God, art, power, and love in a small Turkish hamlet where political Islamism is beginning to undermine the secular order.

A captivating story of conflicting desires for love, art, power, and God, written by the highly renowned author of My Name Is Red, is set in a secluded Turkish village where the secular order is in danger of being overthrown by militant Islamism.

After spending years alone in Western Europe due to political persecution, middle-aged poet Ka returns to Istanbul for his mother's burial. He is only dimly aware of this area from his sophisticated, middle-class upbringing, and he becomes even more confused upon learning of bizarre happenings around the nation, such as a surge in suicides among young women who are not allowed to wear head scarves to school. His writer's curiosity—a frozen sea after all these years—seems to be thawing, and it takes him to Kars, a remote hamlet close to the Russian border that is also the suicide hotspot.

As soon as he gets there, though, it becomes clear that Ka is not only driven by journalistic ambitions. In Kars, which was once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory but is now a cultural wasteland of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a brilliant childhood friend of Ka's who recently got divorced and whom Ka will never forget. As the town is cut off from the contemporary, westernized world that has always served as Ka's frame of reference by the fiercest snowstorm in memory, he finds himself pulled in unexpected directions. These include heading straight toward the mysterious Ipek and the desperate hope for love—or at least a wife—that she embodies, as well as into the chaos of a military coup intended to subdue the local Islamist radicals. Finally, he finds himself drawn toward God, whose existence he has never embraced before. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. However, Ka won't know the outcome of his attempt to grab one final opportunity at happiness until the snow has melted and the brutal political bloodshed has run its course.

Snow highlights the paradoxes engulfing the individual and social heart in many Muslim countries by fusing deep empathy with sly humor. But more than that, via its masterful storytelling and understanding of the obligations and requirements