Then she disappears, and he learns that her family has moved. She knows of his engagement and he knows he must give her up – and he will, any day now. But when he discovers her 'growing amazement' at the new world of sex he introduces her to, their afternoons together become an obsession. He thinks of her as even more modern than Sibel, and love doesn't come into it.

She's a distant cousin called Füsun, a relatively poor relation whom he hasn't seen in some years, and her name carries a hint of scandal, for she's now a lustrous 18 and her parents have let her compete in a beauty contest, swimsuits and all. By then, however, his eye has also been caught by the sales girl. One day Kemal's eye is taken by a designer handbag – the perfect gift, or so he thinks before Sibel tells him it's fake. Still, it's important not only that they have sex but that they're understood to have it by the few other young people in their world, who like to congratulate themselves on their bravery. They use the office couch at his family's export business the employees know, and snigger a bit. His fiancée, Sibel, sees herself as a modern young woman – which means that she isn't a virgin, though she only started to sleep with him 'when she was absolutely sure that there would in the end be a wedding'. Kemal and his friends in Istanbul's moneyed bourgeoisie speak dismissively of those who seem too 'Turkish', and the women in their set go in for blond dye-jobs.

Yet paradoxically, that's also a sign of its youth, for Pamuk's Turkey itself has come late to a modernity that its citizens identify with the west. It is an old city, so old that in 1975, when this stately and intricate novel begins, its principal narrator, Kemal Basmací, still drives a 1956 Chevrolet. Though when was that? Under Ataturk, maybe? Or possibly before, in the Ottoman past that lies all around but of which the book's characters can hardly ever speak. Not dead, far from that, but the hours are small and time itself seems to be running down, as though the whole city were a memorial to its own better days. I t's getting late in the Istanbul of Orhan Pamuk's new novel (his first since winning the 2006 Nobel prize), late in almost every sense of the word.

The museum of innocence review