The Museum of Innocence

'Pamuk has created a work concerning romantic love worthy to stand in the company of Lolita, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina' -Financial Times

A well-crafted novel by Nobel Prize winner, Pamuk about love and obsession in Istanbul 

At Museum Bookstore, we offer books that accompany exhibitions and provide a guide to the artefacts, themes and thoughts that those exhibitions explore. The Museum of Innocence is different, as it is a novel that led to the creation of a museum and touring exhibition.

This beautifully crafted novel by Nobel Prize winner, Pamuk is set in Istanbul between 1975 and today and tells the story of Kemal, the son of one of Istanbul's richest families, and of his obsessive love for a poor and distant relation, the beautiful Füsun, who is a shop-girl in a small boutique. In his romantic pursuit of Füsun over the next eight years, Kemal compulsively amasses a collection of objects that chronicles his lovelorn progress-a museum that is both a map of a society and of his heart.

The novel depicts a panoramic view of life in Istanbul as it chronicles this long, obsessive love affair; and Pamuk beautifully captures the identity crisis experienced by Istanbul's upper classes that find themselves caught between traditional and westernised ways of being. 

Following the publication of the novel, Pamuk built The Museum of Innocence in the house in which his hero's fictional family lived, to display Kemal's strange collection of objects associated with Fusun and their relationship. The house opened to the public in 2012 and is in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul.

Details

• Author: Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize winner
• Paperback: 752 pages
• Date published: September 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN: 978-0571237029
• Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 12.6 x 4.6 cm

Reviews

'It is simply an enthralling, immensely enjoyable piece of storytelling' - The Guardian

'Pamuk has created a work concerning romantic love worthy to stand in the company of Lolita, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina' -Financial Times

'an enchanting.. novel of first love painfully sustained over a lifetime' - New York Times

'a soaring, detailed and laborious mausoleum of love' - Publishers Weekly