I really wanted to like this novel but I found it hard to care 200 pages in. Pamuk may have won the Nobel for Literature and carry impressive quotes by Margaret Atwood on his cover, but he's a long way off from being able to tell a gripping story or create characters one cares for. Unless the fault lies with the translation?

It starts off well enough, with an expatriated poet returning to Turkey from Germany - in particular to a small town where he's been given the task by a newspaper to find out why so many girls are committing suicide. However, this is all just a ruse by Pamuk to question political Islam and contrast it with Turkey's secularist state, all done under a lot of heavy allusions to snowflakes and poetry. The politics and glaringly obvious metaphors just don't sit well enough beside the fiction. It's all very worthy and topical, but just not fun.