The New Life: A Novel

"One of the essential and enduring writers that both East and West can gratefully claim as their own." — New York Times Book Review

Osman is a young university student whose life is changed by a chance encounter with a mysterious book. Osman becomes obsessed with the book, which seems to contain all the magic and power of life and love.

Romantic and elusive, Orhan Pamuk's The New Life is a rhapsody to love and an investigation into the shadowy nature of self.

"Weird, hypnotic. . . . The New Life veers from intellectual conundrums in the Borges vein to rapturous lyricism reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez." — Wall Street Journal

"This enchanting book combines the vertiginous surreality of a dream, the mythic resonance of a fairy tale, the heroic adventure (in ironic version) of a comic book and the sly sleight of hand of a Borges." — Newsday

"Pamuk in his dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection suggests Proust." —John Updike, The New Yorker

Translated from the Turkish by Güneli Gün