The White Castle

A Novel

By: Orhan Pamuk

Narrated by: John Lee

From the Nobel Prize winner and the acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes a dazzling work of historical fiction and a treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West.

From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Borges, Nabokov, and DeLillo, a young Italian scholar in the 17th century sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople. There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja—"master"—a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities. Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a colorful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination. Translated from the Turkish by Victoria Holbrook.

A captivating adventure through place & self

I will be thinking about this book for a very long time! This book is part travelogue, part mystery, part historical fantasy & all about the mystery of self and cultural identities. I couldn't stop listening or being curious about what would happen next & how it would end!

It was a mind-bending story & that captivated me from start to finish.

INTERESTING

This turned out to be a very captivating story.
It took me a while to get really into it and you cannot have your mind “wandering “ about when listening.
The author is excellent and the narrator, Mr. John Lee is the right person to narrate the book.
My thanks to all involved, JK.