Why read Snow?

Book cover of Snow

Book description

Returning to Turkey from exile in the West, the secular poet Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden by the government to wear their head scarves in school. But the epicentre of the suicides, the bleak, impoverished border city of Kars,…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Snow as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

John Krich

Author

This novel is about an exiled Turkish journalist returning home to investigate the suicides of girls over being denied headscarves is Orhan Pamuk's masterwork.

It is the most profound and poetic statement I've ever read on the collision between the conflicting consciousness of the modern and the traditional mind.

From John's list on The best books to travel across cultural borders.

Madison Smartt Bell

Author

I have a project to read the books my daughter left in her bedroom.

This book, suffused with beautiful imagery of the eponymous substance, is the story of an exiled Turkish poet’s return to a remote city in his homeland in quest of romantic love and artistic regeneration. He finds both, though not as expected, and during his stay, the snowbound city is briefly taken over by quasi-Islamic revolutionaries.

Snow has the gravitas of classic 19th-century Russian novels, with its realistic texture frequently interrupted by more postmodern narrative maneuvers, for a synthesis that reads like a dream haunted by…

From Madison's 3 favorite reads in 2023.