Birds Without Wings

Birds Without Wings is a historical novel by the English writer Louis de Bernières, published in 2004.

The book is set in the early twentieth century in Eskibahçe, a fictional village in south-western Anatolia whose inhabitants are Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims. The villagers speak and write a mixture of Turkish and Greek, and the novel shows a community in which the differences of faith are part of ordinary life rather than the reason for it, with weddings, harvests and quarrels shared. Philothei and Ibrahim grow up together and fall in love, and around their story the book follows the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the war and exchange of populations that ended the arrangement the village was built on. The novel is narrated by many of its characters in turn, and its subject is what politics does to people who have no part in making it.

The village is a fictional one assembled from the towns of that region, and the book was written in the knowledge of what happened to the communities living in them.