In an old mansion in Cennethisar a former fishing village near Istanbul an old widow Fatma awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. She has lived in the village for decades ever since her husband an idealistic young doctor first arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden she is attended by her faithful servant Recep a dwarf and the doctors illegitimate son. Under the creeping shadow of right-wing nationalism and political revolution they share memories and grievances of the early years before their home became a high-class resort.Her visiting grandchildren are Faruk a dissipated failed historian; his sensitive leftist sister Nilgun has yet to discover the real-life consequences of highminded politics; and Metin a high school student drawn to the fast life of the nouveaux riches who dreams of going to America. But it is Receps nephew Hassan a high-school dropout lately fallen in with right-wing nationalism who will draw this family into the revolution and the growing political cataclysm issuing from Turkeys tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity. By turns deeply moving hilarious and terrifying Silent House pulses with the energy of a great writers early work even as it offers beguiling evidence of the mature genius for which Orhan Pamuk winner of the Nobel Prize in 2006 would later be world renowned.