Mingling personal memoir with cultural history, Orhan Pamuk explores his own ideas about Istanbul in an evocation of the city that has been his home for fifty years. With a unique sense of history and gift for narrative, Pamuk revisits the houses, streets and neighbourhoods of his childhood, his daydreams and pastimes, and his own family’s secrets and idiosyncrasies.

What begins as a portrait of the artist as a young man becomes a portrait of an extraordinary city. Pamuk guides the reader through Istanbul’s lost paradises, its monuments and dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways, and introduces the city’s many writers, artists and historians.