Birds Without Wings

In his first novel since Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières 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, Birds Without Wings is an enchantment.

• Corelli's Mandolin: A Novel
• The Dust That Falls from Dreams: A Novel (Vintage International)
• Notwithstanding (Vintage International)
• Istanbul: Memories and the City
• So Much Life Left Over: A Novel
• Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds
• My Name Is Red
• The Modern Middle East: A History
• The Bastard of Istanbul
• The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts