The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk ✔✔✔

Pamuk is a Turkish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago - this is his first novel since winning the prize.

Kemal is a young Turkish man, about to become engaged to Sibel, when he meets Fusun, a long-lost relative, and the two fall madly in love. He tries to balance both women in his life, but finally, at his engagement party, Fusun leaves him and disappears. His broken heart, his inability to get on with his life, eventually affects Sibel, and the engagement is broken. But his love for Fusun has become obsessive - and the obsession reveals itself in the items he collects from their time together, a collection which grows and grows and includes items from Fusun's own home - cups she drank from, a cherry pit, a ceramic dog that sits on the TV.

Finally he finds Fusun, whose family has become "reduced in circumstance" and are living in a run-down area of Istanbul. For eight years, Kemal visits the family every night - this part gets a bit long - all the time lifting things from their home to place in what has become his museum to their love. His obsession almost seems to have become the collection, rather than the love it's supposed to commemorate.

This was an unusual book - rather lengthy, but a memorable exploration into romantic attachment, how people deal with loss, the social manners of Istanbul, especially as regards women's behaviour, and the allure of collecting.