In the seventeenth century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople, into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja—'master'—a man who is his exact double. Hoja wonders, given the knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, if they could actually exchange identities. Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a colourful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination.