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Hello on today's program, we investigate who's telling the story and why.

And has Ernest Hemingway been given credit he doesn't deserve for this most famous and brief short story?

For sale, baby shoes, never worn.

Later, why the story of Hemingway winning a bet with that example of flash fiction is probably apocryphal.

But we start at the opposite end of the scale from such minimalism,

with a Nobel laureate best known for his expansive stories,

set mainly in Istanbul, the city of his birth. With books like the Museum of Innocence,

My Name is Redd, and his memoir, Istanbul, Memories and the City, Orhan Pamuk has roamed

the metropolis, orchestrating stories that brilliantly illuminate the lives

of its people and the continuing tensions between East and West, so literally drawn by

the Bosphorus itself. Any novel from Pammock promises a languorous, immersive literary treat,

and this, his ninth, A Strangeness in my mind, is no exception. It's the story of

Mevloot, a street vendor and seller of Boza, in whose company we witness the tectonic shifts in the

social and political landscape of Istanbul over the last four decades. This is the story and the life

and daydreams of Mevut Karatash, a cellar of

boza and yogurt. Born in 1957 on the western edge of Asia, in a poor village overlooking a

hazy lake in central Anatolia, he came to Istanbul at the age of 12, living there in the capital of the world

for the rest of his life. When he was 25, he returned to the province of his birth, where he eloped

with a village girl, a rather strange affair that determined the rest of his days.

Well, I'm delighted to say that Orhan Pamuk joins me in the studio now.

Orhan, as we had, Mervlut starts his story at the tender age of 12.

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