The White Castle
FABER AND FABER
A young Italian scholar is captured by pirates in Italy and put up for auction at an Istanbul slave market He is bought by a Turkish savant eager to learn about Western intellectual advances and their relationship becomes more complex than master and slave as they trade confidences and knowledge Then both find themselves part of the Sultan s army and on a journey that will lead them ultimately to the White Castle
VINTAGE
From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Borges Nabokov and DeLillo comes a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating work of historical fiction and a sinuous treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West In the seventeenth century a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja master a man who is his exact double In the years that follow the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology from medicine to pyrotechnics But Hoja wants to know more why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether given knowledge of each other s most intimate secrets they could actually exchange identities Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery The White Castle is a triumph of the imagination as colorful and intricately patterned as a Turkish prayer rug
