Orhan Pamuk · 1990 · exile

The novel that made Pamuk's reputation, and the one he calls his most Istanbul. A lawyer comes home to find his wife gone and his famous columnist cousin missing on the same day, and spends a week walking the city reading the cousin's old columns as though they were clues - which they may be.

1. 1
   Nisantasi

   The Sehrikalp apartment building, where the whole extended family lives on different floors - and where Galip comes home one evening to find that his wife Ruya has left a nineteen-word note and gone.

2. 2
   Sisli

   The newspaper offices, where his cousin Celal writes a column read by the whole country and has also disappeared - and Galip starts reading thirty years of columns as though they were a set of directions.

3. 3
   Beyoglu

   The old Pera: cinemas, brothels, arcades and Alaaddin's shop, which Celal wrote a famous column about - and a man walking the city at night reading signs into everything, which is what the novel is.

4. 4
   Galata

   Under the tower, the underground workshop where Bedii Usta and his son made mannequins with Turkish faces and gestures that no shop would buy - the book's central image of a country wearing somebody else's expressions.

5. 5
   The Bosphorus

   Celal's column imagining the strait drained dry, and what would be found in the mud: Byzantine wrecks, Crusader galleys, Cadillacs, and gangsters at the bottom in the dark - the most famous chapter Pamuk has written.

6. 6
   Nisantasi

   Galip moves into Celal's flat, wears his dressing gown and starts writing his column - and by the end of a book about a man looking for two people, the question is whether anybody in it was ever himself.