How influential is our first love experience for the rest of our lives? Or is it the power of story and myth that determines our fate? In the mid-1980s, while the well digger Mahmut and his teenage assistant Cem are digging a well in a difficult piece of land to find water, a mysterious woman, an actress of a traveling theater, tells old fairy tales and stories to the audience every night in her outdoor theater.

"The Woman with the Red Hair," centered around Cem's love, draws us into the whirlwind of a great human crime. It narrates the young hero's encounter with love, jealousy, responsibility, independence, and deals with themes of father-son relationship, "authoritarianism," and personality formation. Two deadly sins, patricide and infanticide, will occupy the reader, who once again will encounter two fundamental works of the Western and Eastern worlds, Sophocles' "Oedipus Tyrannus" and Ferdowsi's "Rostam and Sohrab," and will wonder how much our ordinary lives are influenced by ancient texts.