Birds Without Wings (de Bernieres)

Birds Without Wings

576 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400079322


Summary
In his first novel since Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres creates a world, populates it with characters as real as our best friends, and launches it into the maelstrom of twentieth-century history.

The setting is a small village in southwestern Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Everyone there speaks Turkish, though they write it in Greek letters. It’s a place that has room for a professional blasphemer; where a brokenhearted aga finds solace in the arms of a Circassian courtesan who isn’t Circassian at all; where a beautiful Christian girl named Philothei is engaged to a Muslim boy named Ibrahim.

But all of this will change when Turkey enters the modern world. Epic in sweep, intoxicating in its sensual detail, is an enchantment. (.)