From the Nobel Prize winner and best-selling author of Snow and My Name Is Red: a soaring, panoramic new novel—his first since The Museum of Innocence—telling the unforgettable tale of an Istanbul street vendor and the love of his life. Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karataş has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he’d hoped, at the age of twelve he comes to Istanbul—“the center of the world”—and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father’s trade, selling boza (a traditional mildly alcoholic Turkish drink) on the street, and hoping to become rich, like other villagers who have settled the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut’s side. As he watches his relations settle down and make their fortunes, he spends three years writing love letters to a girl he saw just once at a wedding, only to elope by mistake with her sister. And though he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have, he stumbles toward middle age in a series of jobs leading nowhere. His sense of missing something leads him sometimes to the politics of his friends and intermittently to the teachings of a charismatic religious guide. But every evening, without fail, Mevlut still wanders the streets of Istanbul, selling boza and wondering at the “strangeness” in his mind, the sensation that makes him feel different from everyone else, until fortune conspires once more to let him understand at last what it is he has always yearned for. Told from different perspectives by a host of beguiling characters, A Strangeness in My Mind is a modern epic of coming of age in a great city, a brilliant tableau of life among the newcomers who have changed the face of Istanbul over the past fifty years. Here is a mesmerizing story of human longing, sure to take its place among Pamuk’s finest achievements.


曾撰寫《雪》及《我的名字叫紅》而榮獲諾貝爾獎的暢銷作家全新創作！敘述一位穿梭在伊斯坦堡街上小販的一生。從小生長在 Central Anatolia 鄉村裡， Mevlut Karata 一直很好奇自己未來的生活，雖然不會妄想去上學，但至少他希望能在12歲時到世界的中心：伊斯坦堡。他跟隨父親的腳步，在街上販賣 boza ，一種酒精濃度低的土耳其飲料，想著能賺大錢，像村裡其他人能在都會中心旁的荒涼山丘安定下來。但好運卻遲遲沒降臨在 Mevlut 身上，看著他的親戚們各自成家立業，他花了三年的時間寫信給只在婚禮上見過一面的女孩，沒想到意外地和那女孩的妹妹私奔。經過幾年，他仍然珍惜他的太太和他擁有的家庭，但他卻面臨中年的工作危機，他的直覺間接引領他教導信仰的魅力，但每個傍晚 Mevlut 游走在伊斯坦堡的街道上，賣著 boza 、思考著，他的感覺總是讓他和其他人不一樣，一直到好運終於讓他有機會了解到自己所追求的。《A Strangeness in My Mind》由不同角度描述各個角色，同時也講述過去五十年伊斯坦堡的變遷，一個描寫人的渴望的故事也將會是 Pamuk 完美的創作之一。