Literary places in Kars

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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