For December: Snow by Orhan Pamuk

By special request, we are reading something about Turkey. You can listen to an interview of the author by NPR's Steve Inskeep. The main character of the novel is a man named Ka, who is a poet expat living in Germany. He comes back to his hometown in Turkey after a long time away, in part because he is curious about a suicide "epidemic" among local young women. The book touches on politics, religion, the headscarf issue, religious fundamentalism, East and West relations. It is a challenging book - not entirely linear - but should be satisfying to read and we should learn something about Turkey, which is a country we have not read about yet.

For HRW's work on women's human rights in Turkey, see He Loves You, He Beats You.