La vie nouvelle

The New Life (Turkish: Yeni Hayat) is a 1994 novel by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, translated into English by Güneli Gün in 1997. The plot centers around a young engineering student in Istanbul who discovers a "new life" in the pages of a book of the same name. The protagonist finds a number of other readers who have become similarly consumed as well as a few people who seek to destroy the book because of the effect it has on its followers. No passages from the book are revealed, and readers of the novel are left to hypothesize about its nature through the actions of the main character and other obsessed readers. Pamuk started writing the novel when suffering from insomnia caused by a jet lag after a long plane journey. The title of the book was appropriated from Dante Alighieri's work The New Life.