Orhan Pamuk Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk was born June 7, 1952 in Istanbul and grew up in a large family similar to those that he describes in “The Black Book and “Cevdet Bay and His Sons”, in the wealthy westernized district of Nisantasi.

From his childhood until the age of 22, he devoted himself primarily to painting and dreamt of becoming an artist. After he graduated from the secular American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years, however abandoned the course after giving up his ambition to become an artist and architect.

Orhan went on to graduate in journalism from Istanbul University, however he never worked in journalism. When he was 23 he decided to become a novelist, and giving everything else up he retreated into his flat and started writing. Seven years later, he published his first novel, “Cevdet Bey and His Sons” in 1982.

He saw his bit of first international fame when “The White Castle” was translated into English and many other languages from 1990 onwards.

In 1990, he came to America, where he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York from 1985 until 1988. While there, he wrote the majority of “The Black Book”, which was published in Turkey in 1990. The novel enlarged his fame in both Turkey as well as internationally as a writer at once experimental and popular, able to write about both present and past with the same sort of intensity.

In 1991, Ruya, his daughter, was born. That same year saw the production of “Hidden Face”, a film whose script Pamuk wrote based off a one page story in “The Black Book”.

“Cevdet Bey and His Sons” won the Milliyet and Orhan Kemal literary prizes. The French translation of “The Silent House” won the Prix de la decouverte europeene in 1991. “My Name is Red” won the International IMPAC Dublin literary award in 2003, the French Prix du meilleur livre etranger, the Italian Grinzane Cavour in 2002. In 2004, “Snow” was chosen as being one of the 100 best novels of the year by The New York Times. In 2006, Orhan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he was the first Turkish citizen to win the prize.

His work has sold over eleven million books in sixty languages, which makes him the country’s best selling writer, and he is one of Turkey’s most prominent novelists.

“The White Castle” is a stand alone novel and was released in 1990. A dazzling work of historical fiction and a treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between West and East.

A young Italian scholar in the 17th century sailing from Venice to Naples gets taken prisoner and winds up delivered to Constantinople. Here he falls into the custody of this scholar that is known as Hoja (“master”) a guy that is his exact double. In the years to come, the slave instructs his master in Western technology and science, from pyrotechnics to medicine.

However Hoja wants to know more: why he and his prisoner are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of one another’s most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities.

Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and horrifying savagery, “The White Castle” is quite the colorful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination.

“The Black Book” is a stand alone novel and was released in 1994. Galip is an attorney in Istanbul, and Ruya, his wife, has disappeared. Could she be hiding out with Celal, her half brother and a popular newspaper columnist whose fame Galip envies? And if so, why is nobody even in Celal’s flat?

While Galip plays private investigator, he assumes Jelal’s identity, answering his phone calls, wearing his clothes, even faking the man’s wry columns, which he passes off as the work of this missing journalist. However this amateur sleuth bungles his undercover operation, which comes with dire repercussions.

Rabelaisian in scope and richly atmospheric, “The Black Book” is a labyrinthine book suffused with all the scents, sights, and sounds of Istanbul. This is an unforgettable evocation of the city where East and West meet. It is a boldly unconventional mystery novel that plumbs the elusive nature of reality, identity, fiction, and interpretation.

“Nights of Plague” is a stand alone novel and was released in 2022. Part historical epic, part detective novel, this is a brilliant and bold novel which imagines a plague that ravages a fictional island in the Ottoman Empire.

It is April of 1900, in the Levant, on an imaginary island called Mingheria, which is the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire, which is located in the eastern Mediterranean between Cyprus and Crete. One half of the population is Muslim, while the other are Orthodox Greeks, and tensions are high between them both. When this plague arrives, brought either by the Muslim pilgrims coming back from the Mecca or by the merchant vessels returning from Alexandria, the whole island revolts.

Abdul Hamid II, the Ottoman sultan, in order to stop this epidemic, sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to this island, an Orthodox Christian. Some of these Muslims, including followers of this popular religious sect and its leader Sheikh Hamdullah, refuse to take any precautions or even respect the quarantine. And then a murder happens.

While the plague its rapid spread, the Sultan sends another doctor to the island, this time a Muslim, and strict quarantine measures get declared. However the incompetence of the island’s governor as well as the local administration and the people’s refusal to respect the bans dooms this quarantine to failure, and the death count just keeps rising.

Faced with the danger that this plague may spread to Istanbul and to the West, the Sultan bows to international pressures and lets Ottoman and foreign warships to blockade the island. Now the people in Mingheria are all on their own, and they have to figure out a way to defeat the plague by themselves.

Rife with suspense and steeped in history, “Nights of Plague” is an epic tale set over a century prior, with themes which feel remarkably contemporary.