Orhan Pamuk's early work

MUST-READS

Outside Turkey, Orhan Pamuk's reputation has largely been built on his last three books, all of which are outstanding in their own ways: the hugely acclaimed novels My Name is Red and Snow, and his loving, semi-autobiographical tribute to his city, Istanbul.

But now that Pamuk has, at the young age of 54, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, reprints of his previous books are becoming widely available. Though some of his early writing "" including his celebrated first novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons "" has not been translated into English, here's a sample of some of the other treasures.

YENI HAYAT (THE NEW LIFE)
Many critics have likened this strange metaphysical novel to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, but Borges, a master of short fiction, never wrote anything that sustained itself over so many pages.

The New Life begins with this sentence: "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed." These words really sum up the story quite well; Pamuk's novel is about a young student who becomes obsessed with a book (and in turn, with a young woman who might know something about it that he doesn't).

He abandons his family and studies and embarks on a road trip that gets progressively stranger. Following a bus accident, he and the young woman, Janan, acquire new identities and travel to a town called Gudul to met a man named Doctor Fine and uncover the book's secrets.

The New Life is not Pamuk's most accessible work "" it's an abstruse, often frustrating novel that won't appeal to readers looking for an easily understood narrative. But if you have the patience to stick with it, this is a powerful, provocative allegory about the way in which people respond to art and appropriate certain works for themselves.

It's also about the eternal conflict between East and West, a theme that has run through all of Pamuk's work (it's poetic justice that the city in which he has lived all his life is technically located in both Europe and Asia).

KARA KITAP (THE BLACK BOOK)
Galip's wife has mysteriously vanished, and so has her ex-husband, Celal, a newspaper columnist. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming Celal's identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, and even writing his columns. However, when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.

The Black Book has long been cherished as the novel where Pamuk really found his voice, and Maureen Freely's beautiful translation has made it just as accessible to English readers. Incidentally, Pamuk also wrote the screenplay for a film, Gizli Yuz (Secret Face), based on this book, in 1992.

BEYAZ KALE (THE WHITE CASTLE)
This historical novel was the first of Pamuk's work to be translated into English. The author's interest in the doppelganger theme can be traced back to this slim but powerful story, about a young Italian scholar captured by pirates between Venice and Naples, put up for auction at a slave market and bought by a Turkish savant eager to learn about intellectual advances in the West. As they bond over each other's sins and secrets, they find themselves part of the Sultan's army and on a journey to the White Castle.