Nights of Plague

With this story of the fitful birth of a nation state, Pamuk opens up far-reaching questions about the tragic contingencies of history and the forging of national myths. It is an extraordinary achievement (and uncannily prescient, given that Pamuk began writing it four years before the 2020 pandemic).

Sydney Morning Herald

It is a compendium of literary experiments, ludic, audacious, exasperating and entertaining.

Guardian

What is most vital in this book is what is most fictional: Pamuk’s lovingly obsessive creation of the invented Mediterranean island of Mingheria, a world so detailed, so magically full, so introverted and personal in emphasis, that it shimmers like a memory palace, as if Pamuk were conjuring up a lost city of his youth, Istanbul’s exilic, more perfect alter ego.

New Yorker

A big but swift novel, a novel about pain and death that is fundamentally light and buoyant.

New Yorker

Set on an imaginary island at the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, Nights of Plague, by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, is a chronicle of an epidemic, a murder mystery and a winking literary game.

New York Times

The reader is cast as detective in this ludic novel about nationalism, pandemics and propaganda, set in the latter days of the Ottoman empire.

Guardian

A masterpiece of evocation, it conjures up its imaginary island with superb fullness and immediacy . . . it’s as a magnificent panorama of the last days of the Ottoman Empire that this outstanding addition to Pamuk’s fictional surveys of Turkishness will enthrallingly endure.

Sunday Times

A historical novel that will resonate with us all still recovering/reeling from the Covid pandemic . . . A tale of spies, conspiracy and murder, which is full of vivid characters . . . [A] sparkling imagining of an island at the centre of one of life’s catastrophes.

Independent

How cleverly Pamuk has combined true facts with imagined scenes, and how persuasively and patiently he has plotted the course of a nationalist revolution.

Andrew Motion, TLS

The most distinctive pandemic novel yet.

Daily Mail

Orhan Pamuk is the sort of writer for whom the Nobel Prize was invented.

Daily Telegraph

One of the world’s finest living writers.

Independent

Everyone should read Pamuk.

New Statesman