Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0375706860, Paperback)

Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism–these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced.
Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipek’s ex-husband to a charismatic terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude to losing everything else. Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense, Snow is of immense relevance to our present moment.

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0375406972, Hardcover)

From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red (“a sumptuous thriller”–John Updike; “chockful of sublimity and sin”–New York Times Book Review), comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings–for love, art, power, and God–set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order.

Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother’s funeral. 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. An apparent thaw of his writer’s curiosity–a frozen sea these many years–leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides.

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. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Ka’s frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love–or at least a wife–that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness.

Blending profound sympathy and mischievous wit, Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. But even more, by its narrative brilliance and comprehension of the needs and duties

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0739354302, Audio CD)

“A great and almost irresistibly beguiling . . . novelist. . . . [Snow is] enriched by . . . mesmerizing mixes: cruelty and farce, poetry and violence, and a voice whose timbres range from a storyteller’s playfulness to the dark torment of an explorer, lost.”–The New York Times

An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced.
Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipek’s ex-husband to a charismatic terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding God may be the prelude to losing everything else. Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense, Snow is of immense relevance to our present moment.

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 9707701595, Paperback)

A spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings –for love, art, power and God. Following years of lonely political exile in Germany, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother’s funeral. Strange news of a wave of suicides lead him to Kars, a remote Turkish town where political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order. Pamuk creates a stark picture of a too-little known part of the world, illuminating the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. Description in Spanish: En pleno invierno, un poeta y periodista regresa a su ciudad natal, la remota ciudad de Kars en la frontera de Turquía, después de largos años de exilio político en Europa Occidental. La ciudad que encuentra es un lugar conflictivo: hay una ola de suicidios de chicas a las que se les ha prohibido llevar las cabezas cubiertas a la escuela, los islamistas van a ganar las elecciones locales, y el jefe de los servicios de inteligencia es de una eficiencia brutal. La nueva novela del premiado y prestigioso autor de Me llamo Rojo es un thriller político que retrata las más diversas formas de la ambición -el amor, el arte, el poder, la religión- y desenmascara las contradicciones que aprisionan el corazón humano en muchos lugares del mundo islámico.