Affected by a book he reads, Osman, a young student, yearns for the new life it promises. He falls in love, abandons his studies, turns his back on home and family, and embarks on restless bus trips through the provinces.

This is a wondrous odyssey, laying bare the rage of an arid heartland. In coffeehouses with black-and-white TV sets, on buses where passengers ride watching B-movies on flickering screens, in wrecks along the highway, in paranoid fictions with spies as punctual as watches and forsaken cultural objects instilled with poetry, the magic of Pamuk's creation comes alive.