Istanbul is one of the most written-about cities on earth, and that is precisely the problem for a new reader: the shelf is enormous and most of it is scenery. The good books have something in common. They are not about the view. They are about living somewhere that belongs to two continents and several centuries at once, and about what that does to the people inside it.
If a book about Istanbul spends its first chapter on the skyline, it is probably about the skyline. The ones that last start indoors.
Start with the city as a feeling
Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk is the natural first step. It is a memoir rather than a novel, and it is built around a single word the city keeps returning to: huzun, a shared, almost comfortable melancholy. Nothing explains the tone of everything else on this list better. It is slow, so read it in pieces.
Then The Museum of Innocence, also Pamuk, which is an obsessive love story and a street-level map of 1970s Istanbul at the same time. There is a real museum in Cukurcuma built to match the book, which is a strange and lovely thing to know while reading it.
Then the city as a place people argue about
The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar is a comic novel about a bureaucracy invented to correct the nation's clocks, and it is sharper about the pull between old and new than anything written since. Funny in a very dry way, and the best introduction to Tanpinar if his more famous A Mind at Peace feels too dense to start with.
The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak takes a family across generations and lets each member hold a different version of the same past. It moves faster than the Pamuk books and is often the one people finish first.
And the city at street level
The short stories of Sait Faik Abasiyanik are the closest thing Turkish literature has to overhearing the city. Fishermen, waiters, people on the islands, small lives rendered with enormous tenderness and almost no plot. Because they are short, they are also the easiest way in if long novels are not working for you — and short fiction travels well, which is the argument in Turkish short story writers to start with.
For something older and free, Felatun Bey and Rakim Efendi by Ahmet Mithat Efendi is a nineteenth-century novel about two young men in the same city making opposite choices about how modern to be. It is public domain, so you can read it without paying anything — see where to read free public-domain classics.
A reading order that works
If you want one route rather than seven options: begin with the Sait Faik stories for texture, read the Pamuk memoir for the mood, then pick one long novel and stay in it. Starting with the longest and most famous book is how people end up deciding the whole literature is heavy going. It is not — it is just that the doors are in unexpected places.
If you are coming to Turkish writing generally rather than to the city specifically, Turkish literature for beginners is the wider map, with the twentieth-century poets and novelists this list leaves out.
Read it in the city if you can
There is a particular pleasure in reading a book set where you are sitting, and Istanbul is unusually generous about it. A ferry crossing is twenty minutes of enforced stillness with a view of the thing you are reading about, which is close to ideal reading conditions. Long bus journeys do the same job with worse scenery, and we wrote about making that time count in how to read on your commute.
These books want a conversation
Novels about a real place generate arguments — whether a neighbourhood is described fairly, whether the melancholy is honest or a pose, whether the city in the book still exists. Those arguments are much better with someone else who has read the same chapter.
That is the idea behind Arwy: as you read, it connects you with other people reading the same book, so the reaction you want to say out loud has somewhere to go. It is an Android app, so it is no use to you on an iPhone yet, and it is not a catalogue — if what you want is to track and shelve everything you have ever read, a dedicated cataloguing service will serve you better.
Reading a novel set in Istanbul? Find someone else in the same streets. Get Arwy on Google Play.