In the seventeenth century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople, into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja—‘master’—a man who is his exact double. Hoja wonders, given the knowledge of each other’s most intimate secrets, if they could actually exchange identities. Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a colourful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination.

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.