It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingheria --- the 29th state of the Ottoman Empire --- located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives --- brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria --- the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island --- an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader Sheikh Hamdullah, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And then a murder occurs.

On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a well digger and his young apprentice --- a boy fleeing the confines of his middle class home --- are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, they develop a filial bond neither has known before. But when the boy catches the eye of a stunning red-haired woman who seems as fascinated by him as he is by her, the events that ensue change the young man’s life forever and haunt him for the next 30 years.

Arriving in Istanbul as a boy, Mevlut Karataş is enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He becomes a street vendor, like his father, hoping to strike it rich, but luck never seems to be on Mevlut’s side. He spends three years writing love letters to a girl he has seen just once, only to elope by mistake with her sister. Although he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have together, Mevlut stumbles toward middle age as everyone around him seems to be reaping the benefits of a rapidly modernizing Turkey.

Fatma, a mostly bedridden widow, awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. Her servant’s nephew, Hasan, is a high school dropout who has lately fallen in with right-wing nationalists. He will draw the visiting family into the growing political cataclysm issuing from Turkey’s tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity.