From the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name Is Red, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize.It is 1975 in Istanbul. Kemal, thirty, from an upperclass family, is engaged to a girl of like background when by chance he encounters a long-lost relation: Füsun is a shopgirl, an eighteen-year-old beauty who stirs all the passion denied him in a society where sex outside marriage is taboo. Their incandescent liaison will flicker and die when Füsun learns of Kemal’s engagement. But Kemal cannot forget her: he breaks up with his fiancée to pursue Füsun, only to lose her to another man.For nine years Kemal finds excuses to visit Füsun’s impoverished, conservative marital household, playing the kindly cousin, hoping to lure her back. But Füsun’s heart is hardened. From his visits Kemal will take away nothing but odd personal effects, possessions he will collect and cherish, in the private...