The Museum of Innocence

From the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name Is Red, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize.

It is 1975 in Istanbul. Kemal, thirty, from an upperclass family, is engaged to a girl of like background when by chance he encounters a long-lost relation: Fusun is a shopgirl, an eighteen-year-old beauty who stirs all the passion denied him in a society where sex outside marriage is taboo. Their incandescent liaison will flicker and die when Fusun learns of Kemal’s engagement. But Kemal cannot forget her: he breaks up with his fiancee to pursue Fusun, only to lose her to another man.

For nine years Kemal finds excuses to visit Fusun’s impoverished, conservative marital household, playing the kindly cousin, hoping to lure her back. But Fusun’s heart is hardened. From his visits Kemal will take away nothing but odd personal effects, possessions he will collect and cherish, in the private religion his adoration becomes. His hoard will make him famous—and a laughingstock—in Istanbul society. And when a final chance at happiness is ripped away, all that remains to him is his museum, this map of a society’s rituals and mores, and of one man’s broken heart.

A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and the strange allure of collecting, this is Orhan Pamuk’s greatest achievement.


From the Hardcover edition.

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 fifty languages. He lives in Istanbul.