My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

Starts slow but increasingly sucks you in as you’d expect a nobel laureate to do, Pamuk’s novel of an Ottoman murder amongst illuminators vaguely reminds me of the Name of the Rose but reflected from the many viewpoints of the characters gives a subtle, textured view of Istanbullus and their imagined lives during the Sultan.

Also, keeps you guessing who the murderer is right up until the end.

I consider it a bit of a personal failure I read the English translation after giving up on the original Turkish (but not too big of one since I’m about to lend the English version to a native Turkish speaker who said he found it too difficult to read in Turkish… )