Nights of Plague
A Novel
Description
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES o THE FINANCIAL TIMES o THE NEW YORKER
A new book by the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Part detective story, part historical epic--a bold and brilliant novel that imagines a plague ravaging a fictional island in the Ottoman Empire.
It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingeria--the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire--located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives--brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca, or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria--the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island--an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader, Sheikh H, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And the sultan's expert is murdered.
As the plague continues its rapid spread, the sultan sends a second doctor to the island, this time a Muslim, and strict quarantine measures are declared. But the incompetence of the island's governor and local administration and the people's refusal to respect the bans dooms the quarantine to failure, and the death count continues to rise. Faced with the danger that the plague might spread to the West and to Istanbul, the sultan bows to international pressure and allows foreign and Ottoman warships to blockade the island. Now the people of Mingeria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves.
Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is an epic story set more than one hundred years ago with themes that feel remarkably contemporary.
About this Author
ORHAN PAMUK won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. His novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than sixty languages. He lives in Istanbul.
Reviews
"Engrossing. . . . Pamuk's lovingly obsessive creation of the invented Mediterranean island of Mingheria [is] a world so detailed, so magically full, so introverted and personal in emphasis, that it shimmers like a memory palace. . . . The effect is daringly vertiginous, at once floatingly postmodern and solidly realistic. . . . [Nights of Plague is] a big but swift novel, a novel about pain and death that is fundamentally light and buoyant." --James Wood, The New Yorker
"Nights of Plague, Pamuk's 11th -- and longest -- novel, is a real book about an imaginary place, Mingheria, an island in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus...Like William Faulkner, who provided a map of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Pamuk places a map of Mingheria (capital: Arkaz) at the beginning of his book...Like works by Albert Camus, Daniel Defoe and Alessandro Manzoni (whose "The Betrothed" provides an epigraph), this is a plague narrative, a record of Mingheria's deadly yearlong ordeal...But "Nights of Plague" is also an origin story, an account of how a proud island nation achieved its sovereignty... A story that should resonate loudly with the current pandemic. . . . Thrilling." --Steven G. Kellman, Los Angeles Times
"As it pivots between saga and satire, mystery and pseudo-history...[Pamuk] shows nous, charm and cunning as he keeps his bulky cargo afloat and on the move. If this generous hybrid of epidemic soap opera and novel of ideas has becalmed patches, it stirs the senses and flexes the mind. You will be sad to leave lavishly imagined Mingheria, where 'a view of the sea and a trace of its scent' can always 'make life seem worth living again'." --Boyd Tonkin, The Spectator
"One of the most interesting books I've read this year...[Pamuk] flout[s] the normal rules of storytelling...And yet none of these infringements of literary convention seems to matter much when set against the exuberance of Pamuk's invention...a compendium of literary experiments, ludic, audacious, exasperating and entertaining." --Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Guardian
"A novelist for the post-truth age. . . . Pamuk is able to pose timely questions about the nature of the state. . . . How do we know a legitimate government from a dictatorship? Pamuk has built a maze around the answer, and that's an answer in itself." --The Atlantic
"Nights of Plague might pass for an old-fashioned, detail-rich, Tolstoyian epic. . . . Pamuk's delight in art and artifice is inextricable from his realistic accounts of . . . political intrigue, cultural and religious enmity, gender inequity, and medical futility." --The New York Times
"Scintillating. . . . By the end of this long book the artist's alchemy has taken effect and readers may find themselves in that immeasurably strange and deeply cherished condition of being swept away by events they know perfectly well never happened." --The Wall Street Journal
"Deftly blending rich realism and wry social commentary, Turkish Nobel laureate Pamuk . . . delivers an invented history that leverages the all-too-familiar experience of a deadly pandemic to return to one of his cherished topics: Ottoman bureaucratic and social reform. . . . Pamuk is always a must-read, and the potency and timeliness of this novel will stir even more interest." --Booklist (starred review)
"Consistently captivating . . . the cracking narrative will keep readers in for the long haul." --Publishers Weekly
"Pamuk's prose is as elegant and informed as ever. . . . [His] storytelling is so compelling and coy; his intelligence and interests so wide-ranging . . . there is a great deal here to savor." --Kirkus Reviews
If the product is in stock at the store nearest you, we suggest you call ahead to have it set aside for you, or you may place an order online and choose in-store pickup.