Like several other writers, Orhan Pamuk took time during the recent COVID-19 pandemic to write a "COVID book" (Jonathan Lethem's The Arrest also comes to mind). Pamuk's book, the nearly 700-page long Nights of Plague is an epic story set at the start of the 20th century in the fictional backwater island in the Aegean Sea "Mingheria", that was part of the disintegrating Ottoman empire. The island territory, at the start of the story, is in the early stages of a plague epidemic that ultimately gets much worse and ravages its people and precipitates an independence movement away from Ottoman control. The long and convoluted story, embedded in a self-reflexive narrative structure, is detailed and vivid. There is also a murder mystery at the start of the story that regularly comes back into focus. The book is a pleasure to read if you are a Pamuk fan and don't mind getting dragged through a convoluted story that eventually comes together in interesting ways.
For a review of the book by NY Times, click here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/30/books/review/nights-of-plague-orhan-pamuk.html
