Silent House.

PAMUK, Orhan.

$400.00

Item Number: 122479

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

First edition of this “superb novel, which grips the reader and refuses to let go” (The New Yorker). Octavo, original half cloth. Signed by dated in the year of publication by Orhan Pamuk on the title page. Additionally signed three times by the jacket illustrator Chip Kidd, once on the front panel, once on the title page, and again on the rear jacket flap. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Chip Kidd. Translated from the Turkish by Robert Finn.

In a crumbling mansion in a gentrified former fishing village on the Turkish coast, the widow Fatma awaits the annual visit of her grandchildren: Faruk, a dissipated historian; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgün; and Metin, a high schooler drawn to the fast life of the nouveaux riche. Bedridden, Fatma is attended by her faithful servant Recep, a dwarf—and her late husband’s illegitimate son. Mistress and servant share memories, and grievances, from the past. But the arrival of Recep’s cousin, Hasan, a fervent right-wing nationalist, threatens to draw the family into the political cataclysm arising from Turkey’s tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity.