Jawdat Bey and his sons

Author's name: Orhan Pamuk

An epic novel that chronicles the political, economic, and social changes in Turkey during the 20th century, spanning successive generations of the Cevdet Bey family. The first, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, the second with the death of Atatürk in the late 1930s, and the third with the military coup in the 1970s. When Pamuk was asked about the similarities between Cevdet Bey and His Sons and Naguib Mahfouz's trilogy, he replied, "I think I may share with Mahfouz the characters' relationships with place, the writing of neighborhoods and streets, and the handling of side conversations and conspiracies told by women. But the matter is more general than this. I am concerned with the transformation of the lives of large families, where they coexist as if they were a unified group, and then the family disintegrates from the traditional wooden house into separate dwellings within a unified structure... All of this forms my fictional world, which may resemble Mahfouz's, but also differs from it."