Snow

From the acclaimed author of My Name Is Red ("a sumptuous thriller"--John Updike; "chockful of sublimity and sin"--New York Times Book Review), comes a spellbinding tale of disparate yearnings--for love, art, power, and God--set in a remote Turkish town, where stirrings of political Islamism threaten to unravel the secular order.
Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer's curiosity--a frozen sea these many years--leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides.
No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka's motivations are not purely...