It is April 1900 on the imaginary island of Mingheria --- a state of the Ottoman Empire --- located 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, the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, an accomplished quarantine expert races to the island. What follows is a shocking murder. The plague continues its rapid spread and stricter quarantine measures are declared, but the incompetence of the island’s governor, increased hostility between the two religions, and the people’s refusal to respect the bans doom the quarantine to failure. As the death count rises, warships blockade the island to keep the disease from spreading. Now the people of Mingheria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves.

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.