My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk (1998)

A corpse calls up from the bottom of a well, and so begins one of the strangest, most ravishing murder mysteries ever written, narrated in turn by the dead man, a gold coin, a dog, a tree, the colour red itself, and Death. In the snowbound Istanbul of 1591, the Sultan's miniaturists are secretly illuminating a book in the forbidden Frankish manner, with its scandal of perspective and portraiture, its vanity of an individual hand, and one of them has killed to bury the blasphemy. Beneath the whodunit runs the real wound: a war between two ways of seeing the world, the Persian master who paints a horse as God remembers it and goes blind in holy perfection, against the Venetian who paints what one mortal eye happens to see. Threaded through is the patient, aching courtship of Black and the widow Shekure. Pamuk makes you feel that to choose a style is to lose your soul, and to fall in love is to risk it anyway.