Snow by Orhan Pamuk

In snowfall the poet Ka comes back to Turkey after more than a ten years abroad, and excursions to Kars, far in the east. Among the things he wants to find there is an old classmate and love, Ipek, now divided from her husband. He furthermore designs to discover and report on a wave of suicides by young women there.

It is snow when Ka reaches, and the snowfall continues to drop, cutting off the town from the rest of the world. There is tension there: an imminent mayoral election, the struggle between belief and secularism, a heavy-handed police ...