Nights of Plague

Orhan Pamuk is Turkey’s most famous writer and a Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. His new book, “Satanic Nights,” is a historical detective novel steeped in the atmosphere of an Eastern fairy tale; it blends the most contradictory themes: love and politics, religion and the plague, the East and the West. “Satanic Nights” not only immerses the reader in a distant past, but also ruthlessly illuminates the present day. The story takes place on a small Mediterranean island, where both Greek (Orthodox) and Turkish (Islamic) populations live. The calm life of this paradise corner is disrupted by the arrival of a terrible disease—the plague. To suppress it, and on another secret mission, a physician-epidemiologist arrives on the island together with his wife and with the sultan’s nephew, the Second Abdul-Hamid. However, not everyone on the island is willing to follow the doctor’s instructions and quarantine measures, because in the end it is all up to Allah’s will—and resisting that will can be deadly…