| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9781400079322 | | Publisher: Random House Inc | | Publish Date: 6/28/2005 | | Buy.com Sku: 31159823 | | Item#: R3J49F | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7.75H x 5.25L x 1T | | Pages: 576 |
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| | | Filled with humor and pathos, the long-awaited new novel by the bestselling author of "Captain Corelli's Mandolin" tells a story about the political and personal costs of war, and of love, in one small community in southwest Turkey in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire.
Annotation:
Louis de Bernires's epic novel encompasses the history of Turkey from the late 19th century to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s. Narrated by a variety of voices (including a potter, a beautiful young woman in love with a goatherd, and a man whose adulterous wife is stoned to death), BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS is both an engrossing story of a rich culture and its people, and a meditation about the effects of nationalism and religion on the country's history.
| PraiseKirkus
"[A]n epic chronicle of the making of modern Turkey....Enormously readable, intermittently brilliant, honorably conceived and felt...." 08/15/2004Publishers Weekly
"Though some readers may balk at the novel's sheer heft, the reward is an effective and moving portrayal of a way of life--and lives--that might, if not for Bernires's careful exposition and imagination, be lost to memory forever." 08/30/2004 New York Times Book Review
"[A]n absorbing epic....In the end, this is a book about mourning, about grief at the loss of a community where Muslims and Christians were more than neighbors, where the imam went out of his way to bless a Christian child and Christians prayed to the Virgin Mary for their Muslim brothers." - Amy Kroin 10/31/2004 |
| Author Bio| Louis de Bernieres | | Louis de Bernieres was born in London and raised in Surrey. Both his parents served in World War II, his father as a major in the British Army, his mother a Wren. Meant for an army career himself, he put in four months at Sandhurst before he left, going off to teach in Colombia for two years--a setting he uses often in his fiction. ("They celebrated things we would be embarrassed about," he said in an interview.) He subsequently attended the Universities of Manchester and London, earning a philosophy degree, after which he took jobs as a bike messenger, a landscape gardener, and a groundsman at a mental hospital before becoming a teacher and writing his first novel, THE WAR OF DON EMMANUEL'S NETHER PARTS, the first of his Latin American trilogy. After a holiday in Cephalonia, he became interested in the wartime history of the island; the result was CORELLI'S MANDOLIN, the success of which enabled DeBernieres to quit his teaching job and write full time. As a hobby, he repairs musical instruments, including mandolins. |
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