Set in mid-1980s Istanbul, the novel follows a young apprentice who works with a master well-digger on a barren plain outside the city. A father/son bond develops between them, but the boy becomes infatuated with a mysterious red-haired woman in the nearby town. The story is a literary work that explores themes of fathers and sons, the state versus individual freedom, and compares the fundamental Western myth of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (patricide) with the Eastern tale of Rostam and Sohrab (filicide).