No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka's motivations are not purely journalistic for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka's youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. An apparent thaw of his writer's curiositya frozen sea these many yearsleads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearningsfor love, art, power, and Godset in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order.įollowing years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral.
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