Declared essential by Margaret Atwood, this atmospheric novel translated from Turkish has emerged as this month’s choice

Orhan Pamuk’s Snow has emerged as our choice of translated novel to read this month. Since most of us in the UK have recently experienced a great deal of the white stuff, this novel sounds like an apt choice. As the Guardian’s 2004 review explains:

Orhan Pamuk’s new novel is set in the early 1990s in Kars, a remote and dilapidated city in eastern Anatolia famed less for its mournful relics of Armenian civilisation and Russian imperial rule than for its spectacularly awful weather. Snow, “kar” in Turkish, falls incessantly on the treeless plains and the castle, river and boulevards of Kars, which the local scholars say takes its name from “karsu” (snow-water).

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