My Name Is Red

Constantinople, 1591. A miniaturist — a master of the classical Ottoman style — has been murdered. His killer is one of the other painters in the workshop of the Sultan, and the detective who must identify the murderer is Kara, a manuscript illuminator recently returned from exile who is also in love with the murdered man’s niece Shekure. What follows is a murder mystery, a love story, and a profound meditation on art, style, individuality, and the question of what the Islamic tradition of painting was for — and why it was threatened by the encroachment of Western perspective.

Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red — winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature — is one of the most original and most beautiful novels of the twenty-first century, narrated by a cast of voices that includes a corpse, a dog, a tree, and the colour red itself.

A masterpiece of world literature. Published by Faber & Faber.