For the daydreaming child, the young Orhan Pamuk, the heart of the great city of Istanbul was the building known as "Pamuk Apartmani." Here, the extended family lived; uncles, aunts, grandmothers, each branch of the family on its own floor. Now, the writer Orhan Pamuk, with his unique sense of history and extraordinary storytelling talent, recounts the secrets of his own family and discovers how they were typical of their time and this particular place. He takes us to the famous monuments and lost paradises of the legendary city, showing us the decaying Ottoman villas, the waterways of the Bosporus and the Golden Horn, the dark alleys of the old town, and tells stories of painters, poets, and murderers. Under Pamuk's hands, autobiography transforms, and what begins as a portrait of the writer unfolds into a profound exploration of the past.