"Three siblings are paying their annual summer visit to their 90-year-old grandmother in the family home by the sea. Reduced to these bare bones of plot, Orhan Pamuk’s “Silent House” almost sounds like one of those plays about dynastic reunions that help keep the lights of Broadway bright, letting their audiences enjoy the spectacle of tensions burbling beneath the cocktail-hour banter, then erupting in a frenzy of recrimination and resentment as buried secrets are exhumed, accusations leveled and amends made just in time for the final curtain."

The New York Times Sunday Book Review examines Pamuk's new work with a thorough eye for plot-twists driven by character: "To paraphrase Chekhov’s statement about the gun on the stage having to go off before the final act: if a writer gives a poor right-wing boy an unrequited, soured passion for a middle-class, left-wing girl, something awful is going to happen before the final chapter."

Read the review: Broken Homeland: ‘Silent House,’ by Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature. He took part in the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (IWP) in the fall of 1985.