Orhan Pamuk - The Museum of Innocence

The Times“As a study of obsessive attachment, the novel fails to grip...” At its best, it adds another engrossing dimension to his continuing fictional exploration, documentation and celebration of Turkishness...

Financial Times“worthy to stand in the company of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina...” The Museum of Innocence is concerned with such consequences of romantic love (and loss), its capacity to generate intense happiness, intense despair and an obsessional search for objective evidence of subjective reality.

The Scotsman“An 83-chapter tome that comes with its own museum...” A bittersweet love story, one dedicated to Istanbul. Pamuk takes us through its winding streets and shows us its culture, its people and its struggle to reconcile its Islamic culture with Western influences and aspirations...

Guardian“An enthralling, immensely enjoyable piece of storytelling...” The large-scale social portraiture of The Museum of Innocence is beautifully assured; lightly satirical but also affectionate; a very tender evocation of Istanbul's moment of dolce vita.

The Independent“A mesmeric invocation of a passion and a place...” Pamuk summons to new life his home city 30 years ago, as it mourned its past and stumbled into its future. He exhibits all that near-hallucinatory gift for ambience and atmosphere that places him among the great urban novelists of any age...

Economist“His most accessible novel and his most profound...” Following the spirit of Marcel Proust or another Turkish writer, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, the novelist’s art is to accumulate detail in “a ‘sentimental museum’ in which each object shimmered with meaning”...

The New York Times“The charms of Pamuk’s storytelling...” There’s not much plot to “The Museum of Innocence”; and why should there be, if the artist is free? Still, Pamuk comes up with a cinematic ending, easy and swift as though churned out in a Turkish B-movie...

Publishers Weekly“A soaring, detailed and laborious mausoleum of love...” Though its incantatory middle suffers from too many indistinguishable quotidian encounters, this is a masterful work...

The Telegraph“Not yet reviewed”

The New Yorker“Not yet reviewed”