The New Life

By: Orhan Pamuk

Narrated by: John Lee

From the Nobel Prize winner and the acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes an engaging intellectual thriller and high romance set in Turkey about a young student whose life and identity is uprooted through the single act of reading a book.

The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's fiendishly engaging novel is launched into a world of hypnotic texts and (literally) Byzantine conspiracies that whirl across the steppes and forlorn frontier towns of Turkey. And with The New Life, Pamuk himself vaults from the forefront of his country's writers into the arena of world literature. Through the single act of reading a book, a young student is uprooted from his old life and identity. Within days of reading a book, a young student’s old life and identity is uprooted, and he’s fallen in love with the luminous and elusive Janan; witnessed the attempted assassination of a rival suitor; and forsaken his family to travel aimlessly through a nocturnal landscape of traveler's cafes and apocalyptic bus wrecks. As imagined by Pamuk, the result is a wondrous marriage of the intellectual thriller and high romance. Translated from the Turkish by Guneli Gun.

Critic reviews

"[A] weird, hypnotic new novel.... It veers from intellectual conundrums in the Borges vein to rapturous lyricism reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez." —The Wall Street Journal

"One of the essential and enduring writers that the East and West can gratefully claim as their own." —The New York Times Book Review

Very much worth hanging in there

There's a ton of excellent reviews out there so I won't be redundant. There is definitely a slow period towards the beginning of the book, but hang in there because the latter half of the story is fantastic. I very much enjoyed the narrator's performance as well. If you are a fan of Pamuk then this will not disappoint.