Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk
In the darkening days of spring 2020, Turkey’s first Nobel laureate in literature, Orhan Pamuk, found himself hard at work on a novel three decades in gestation. Its subject: a plague (the bubonic kind) at the turn of the last century.
Pamuk had set his tale of illness, death, and social upheaval on a gorgeous, mythical Ottoman isle he calls Mingheria, idyllically located in the clear blue Mediterranean Sea near Crete and Cyprus. Pamuk was living in New York City at the time and teaching at Columbia University.
