We enter Istanbul in the mid-1980s. Mahmut and his apprentice use an ancient method of digging wells. Forced into inhuman efforts, the pair unfold a stunning series of stories and images – the writer's subtlety leads us to reflect on fathers and sons, authoritarianism and individualism, the state and freethinking, on what has been read and what has been felt and seen. The original narrative, based on a witnessed act of murder that took place three decades ago, is torn apart to be reassembled into a meditation on the essence of the civilized world... After the writer intelligently combines a pair of mythologies – Sophocles with Oedipus the King and the Persian poet Ferdowsi with the tragedy of Rostam and Sohram. The novel ends with the Redhead's monologue, in which she speaks of two different Turkeys, a progressive and a backward one, and shows the position of women in a society based on tradition, family values, and patriarchal relations, and rejects everything different and unusual. It is then that we learn that the red color of her hair is actually symbolic, and also that we cannot escape the fate written in the legends.