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FICTION: PETER MURPHYreviews The Museum of InnocenceBy Orhan Pamuk. Trans. Maureen Freely Faber Faber, 532pp. £18.99

AT A relatively youthful 57, the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has a trophy shelf that includes the 2003 Impac award and the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. His breakthrough novel, My Name Is Red(2000), was, like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, your classy publisher’s dream: a lush historical novel that garnered all manner of critical garlands and yet was palatable enough to be bought and read by the truckload. Pamuk, a freedom-of-speech test case in his native country, has sold some seven million books worldwide, ascending to the pantheon of writers – McCarthy, Coetzee, Proulx and Ishiguro – whose virtuosity is seemingly beyond reproach yet won’t scare the horses in the marketplace.