Mapped
My Name Is Red
Orhan Pamuk
Over nine snowbound days in the winter of 1591, a miniaturist is found murdered in Istanbul, and Black, newly returned to the city, must find the killer among the Sultan's painters while courting the widow Shekure. Pamuk maps the real Ottoman capital: the workshops and streets of the old city, the imperial palace of Topkapi where the Sultan's secret European-style book is being made, the coffeehouse where the miniaturists gather, and the snow-covered city above the Bosphorus, in a novel that is also a meditation on art, faith and the clash of East and West.
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Snow
Orhan Pamuk
The poet Ka comes back from years of exile in Germany to Kars, a poor, half-forgotten city in the far north-east of Turkey near the Armenian border, to report on an epidemic of suicides among devout young women, and is snowed in for three days during which a small theatrical coup convulses the town. The real Kars gives the book its bones: the snowbound streets, the theatre where the coup is broadcast live, the tea houses of the unemployed, and the ruined Armenian churches that speak of a vanished past.
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The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
Franz Werfel
Based on a true episode of the Armenian genocide, Werfel's epic follows the Armenians of seven villages who, rather than submit to deportation in 1915, fortify the mountain of Musa Dagh above the Mediterranean and hold out for forty days until French warships take them off. The real coast of the old Vilayet of Aleppo, now Hatay, grounds it: the villages at the mountain's foot, the fortified plateau of the Damlayik, the sea below from which rescue comes, and the plain toward Antioch where the Ottoman power gathers.
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The Museum of Innocence
Orhan Pamuk
One man's love turned into an inventory of a city. The map runs from the wealthy boutiques and flats of Nişantaşı, where Kemal is engaged and the affair begins, down the hill through Beyoğlu to the old timber houses of Çukurcuma, where the years of longing settle and where Pamuk later built a real museum to hold them.
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