The simple act of reading a book uproots Orhan Pamuk's student protagonist from his old identity and into a world of hypnotic text and endlessly ramifying conspiracies. Within days he falls in love with the elusive Janan; witnesses an attempted assassination; and forsakes his family to become a wanderer across the Turkish steppes as he seeks out "the new life" promised by the book--while outracing the almost certain death that pursues its readers.
From the Nobel Prize winner and the acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes an engaging intellectual thriller and high romance set in Turkey about a young student whose life and identity is uprooted through the single act of reading a book.

The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's fiendishly engaging novel is launched into a world of hypnotic texts and (literally) Byzantine conspiracies that whirl across the steppes and forlorn frontier towns of Turkey. And with The New Life, Pamuk himself vaults from the forefront of his country's writers into the arena of world literature. Through the single act of reading a book, a young student is uprooted from his old life and identity. Within days of reading a book, a young student's old life and identity is uprooted, and he's fallen in love with the luminous and elusive Janan; witnessed the attempted assassination of a rival suitor; and forsaken his family to travel aimlessly through a nocturnal landscape of traveler's cafes and apocalyptic bus wrecks. As imagined by Pamuk, the result is a wondrous marriage of the intellectual thriller and high romance. Translated from the Turkish by Guneli Gun.