Snow

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.

Kars (the snowbound city)

Chapter 1

Ka comes to Kars ostensibly to investigate why so many headscarf-wearing girls have killed themselves, and secretly in hope of a new life with a woman he barely knows. The snow that begins as he arrives cuts the city off from the world, sealing him inside its politics of poverty, Islam and the state.

Chapter 1

explicit Ka arrives by bus through a blizzard in Kars, a real provincial city in far north-east Turkey; the whole novel takes place in its snowbound streets over three days.

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