Orhan Pamuk, "The Red-Haired Woman"

One of the most celebrated novelists at work today, Orhan Pamuk is the first Turkish Nobel Laureate and the author of ten novels, including My Name is Red and Snow. His newest work begins as a story of the artist as a young man, but Cem, a budding writer, instead becomes a geologist. When, age sixteen, he meets an alluring older woman, the novel promises a love story, but the romance serves as a catalyst for an exploration of fathers and sons: what they owe each other, how well they can know each other, and the myriad ways they betray each other. Cem's own father was by turns a political prisoner and a philanderer and he grew up largely fatherless. As Pamuk intertwines Cem's story with the myths of Oedipus, who killed his father, and Rostam, the father who killed his son in the Persian Shahnameh, he also illuminates Turkey's often uneasy position straddling east and west.

Pamuk is in conversation with Azar Nafisi, author of books including The Republic of Imagination and Reading Lolita in Tehran.

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Produced by Tom Warren