Nights of Plague

Nights of Plague is a 2021 novel by Orhan Pamuk, his eleventh and the second longest of his works. Inspired by historical events, it is set on the fictitious island of Mingheria in the eastern Mediterranean, between Crete and Cyprus. Pamuk began writing it in 2016, drawn to the way plagues have been Orientalized in books such as Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, Manzoni's The Betrothed and Camus's The Plague. In a 2020 article he argued that Western observers such as Defoe saw a fatalistic tendency in the Muslim world.

The story is set in 1901, when a ship from Istanbul arrives at Mingheria, where bubonic plague has broken out. The island serves as a microcosm of the declining Ottoman Empire, where diverse groups coexist on the verge of disintegration. To fight the epidemic, an inspector and an epidemiologist are dispatched, but when the inspector is murdered, Princess Pakize and Doctor Nuri must investigate the crime using methods reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, while the islanders resist quarantine and infections and deaths mount.

Critics noted its character as satire and metaphor on Ottoman, revolutionary and nationalist leadership, and its reflection on the fragmented political identities that preceded World War I. James Wood, in The New Yorker, observed that Pamuk seems to relish the Orientalism he critiques.