SNOW - A Novel written by Orhan Pamuk

Plot summary from wikipedia.org :

A poet who goes by the name Ka returns to Turkey after a twelve-year political exile in Germany. A friend in Istanbul who works for a newspaper suggests that he go to the town of Kars, near Turkey's eastern border of Armenia and Georgia, posing as a journalist. Recently, the suicides of a number of young women in the area have brought attention to the small town. Ka begins to interview residents and learns what he can about the deaths. The suicides are causing much controversy among local Muslims as suicide is forbidden in the religion.

Ka reunites with a woman named İpek, whom he once had feelings for and whose father runs the hotel he is staying in. İpek had married a man named Muhtar, but the two are now divorced, partly due to Muhtar's newfound interest in political Islam. While İpek and Ka are in a café, they witness a shooting of the local director of the Institute of Education by a Muslim extremist from out of town who blames the director for the death of a young woman named Teslime, claiming she killed herself because of the director's ban on head-scarves in school. After the incident, Ka visits Muhtar, who tells him about his experience of finding Islam, which relates to a blizzard and meeting a charismatic sheikh named Saadettin Efendi. The police pick up Ka and Muhtar due to the killing of the minister. Ka is questioned and Muhtar is beaten.

Though most of the early part of the story is told in the third-person from Ka's point of view, an omniscient narrator sometimes makes his presence known, posing as a friend of Ka's who is telling the story based on Ka's journals and correspondence. This narrator sometimes provides the reader with information before Ka knows it or foreshadows later events in the story.

Though he has suffered from writer's block for a number of years, Ka suddenly feels inspired and composes a poem called "Snow", which describes a mystic experience. Other poems follow. At İpek's suggestion, Ka goes to see Sheikh Saadettin and confesses that he associates religion with a backwardness that he does not want himself or Turkey to fall into. But he feels a sense of comfort with the sheikh and begins to accept his new poems as gifts from God.

Other significant characters Ka encounters include a wanted Muslim radical named Blue and İpek's younger sister Kadife, who has joined and become the leader of the "head-scarf girls", those who insist upon being "covered." Through Kadife, he meets another head-scarf girl, Hande, who suggested suicide to Teslime but insists she did not intend for the girl to follow through. Throughout the book, the act of insisting upon wearing a head-scarf, which places these girls in a head-on collision with the state authorities and entails enormous pressures and sacrifices, is described as an act of empowerment and assertion of their identity as women; in one passage, Ka refers to them as "Islamic Feminists".

Ka is impressed by Necip, a student at the religious high school, who, like many of the young Muslims at the school, is quite taken by Kadife. The narrator lets the reader know that Necip will die soon. Growing tensions between secularists and Islamists explode during a televised event at the National Theater, during which one secular group puts on a classic play condemning head scarves. When Muslims protest, three nationalists take the stage and start firing. Necip is among those killed. The police and military establish martial law, and Ka is taken in for questioning because he has been seen with Islamists. He is shattered to find Necip's body in the morgue and identifies him as the one who led him to Blue.

Ka is taken to meet Sunay Zaim, an actor whose group put on the play at the National Theater and who is now orchestrating the round-ups and investigations of suspicious persons. Sunay is a staunch Turkish Republican, who had often played with great conviction revolutionaries and dictators such as Robespierre, Napoleon and Lenin, but whose dream to play Attaturk, the founder of the Turkish Reublic, was frustrated. As the snow has made the roads and railroads impassable, no outside authorities are able to intervene in the coup. The isolation of Kars and Sunay's old friendship with the senior military officer left in charge of the local garrison enabled him to become a revolotionary dictator in real life as well as on the stage, for a for at least a few days - his act being simultaneously a coup d'état and a coup de théâtre.

Ka is then taken by Kadife to speak with Blue, who is Kadife's lover. Ka convinces Blue that he has a contact at a newspaper in Germany who will be willing to print a statement denouncing the coup if Blue can get support from non-Islamists. To further this fiction, Ka returns to his hotel to convince Kadife and Ipek's leftist father Turgut Bey to collaborate on the statement. After the father and Kadife leave, Ka's longing for İpek is fulfilled when the two make love.

At this point, the narrator, who identifies himself as a novelist named Orhan, flashes forward four years and relates that Ka spent the last years of his life obsessing over İpek and writing unsent letters to her before being murdered in Frankfurt. The narrator will play a much larger role in the story in the later chapters of the novel. We are clearly meant to identify the narrator with Orhan Pamuk himself as he later identifies The Black Book as one of his works, as well as Museum of Innocence which he would later publish in 2008.

Turgut Bey attends a meeting at which representatives from the various factions opposed to the coup, including Islamists, leftists, and Kurds, attempt comically to produce a coherent statement to the European press denouncing the action. After Blue is arrested and held by the nationalists, Ka negotiates a deal with Sunay Zaim that will result in Blue's release but only if Kadife agrees to play a role in Zaim's production of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and remove her head-scarf on live television during the course of the play. Both Kadife and Blue agree.

Ka is soon picked up and beaten by two policemen who are trying to keep tabs on Blue. He is also given the devastating news that Ipek was Blue's mistress during her marriage to Muhtar and still keeps in contact with him. Ipek confesses the affair and further indicates that Kadife only got involved with Blue out of envy. Ka's jealousy is intense and the two fall asleep after weeping together. She still believes that they can go to Frankfurt and be happy, and he eventually comes around to believing it again too. However, before they can leave he must convince Kadife to not take her head-scarf off during the play as both Ipek and Turgut Bey have become very concerned at the possible reaction of the students from the religious school. Despite Ka's urging, Kadife insists upon uncovering herself during the performance.

After a scene in which Ka is seen confused and tormented by feelings of pain and jealousy, the narrative describing events from his point of view abruptly breaks off. The narrator explains that Ka had left behind a detailed account of his acts and feelings while in Kars, but that there was no reference to his last hours in the city, and it is left to his friend Orhan to try to reconstruct these by following in Ka's footsteps, visiting the places where he had been and meeting the people he had met.

Ka's actions immediately after leaving the theater remain a mystery which is never completely untangled. Orhan is, however, able to establish that Ka was later taken by the military to the train station, where he was put on the first train scheduled to leave now that the routes from the town are open again. Ka complied but sent soldiers to retrieve İpek for him. However, just as İpek is saying her farewells to her father, news arrives that Blue and Hande have been shot. İpek is shattered and blames Ka for leading the police to Blue's hideout. Instead of going to Ka, she and her father go to the theater to see Kadife.

The novel's narrator then describes events at the theater as if he has reconstructed them from various sources. Kadife and Zaim have an on-stage discussion about suicide and the different reasons why men and women kill themselves. A garret and noose are set up, and Zaim hands Kadife a gun after he demonstrates that it is not loaded. When Kadife shoots Zaim much of the audience assumes his death is staged, and even Kadife appears to be surprised that the gun is in fact loaded. Zaim had clearly prepared and orchestrated his own death on stage, "pushing art to its farthest limits" and preferring to die at the peak of his theatrical and political career. Soon afterwords, as the snow has subsided, Ka's train departs and local authorities enter the town to stifle the coup and restore order.

Years later, the narrator goes to Kars to uncover details on Ka's story. He meets with many of the principals, including Kadife, who served very little time for what was ruled an accidental homicide and is now married to a student from the religious school. Meeiting Ipek, the narrator himself falls deeply in love with her and becomes intensely jealous of his dead friend (and of the dead Blue). In his talk with İpek he tells her that Ka was a shattered man who never forgot about İpek but was prevented from returning to Kars due to a warrant for his arrest. İpek is still convinced that Ka betrayed Blue. Indeed, the narrator soon finds evidence that suggests that Ka went back to talk to the police after his visit to the theater and probably told them where to find Blue. İpek has remained unmarried, does not expect to ever find love again, and devotes herself to her nephew.

In the end it is disclosed that a new group of Islamic militants was formed by younger followers of Blue who had been forced into exile in Germany and based themselves in Berlin, vowing to take revenge for the death of their admired leader. It is assumed that one of them had assassinated Ka and taken away the only extant copy of the poems he had written in Kars. Thus, while much is told about the names of these poems, their themes and the circumstances under which each was written, the poems themselves are lost.