A bird without wings

A small town in southwestern Anatolia, in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Its people speak Turkish, even though they write it with Greek letters. A heartbroken agha finds solace in the arms of a Circassian woman who is not Circassian at all, and a stunning Christian girl named Philothi becomes involved in a tragic love story with a Muslim boy named Ibrahim. A Greek priest sees the Lord's funeral in his dream, a Turkish imam longs for paradise, and political tricks and rising nationalism throw children and youth into the furnace of the Great War. Against the backdrop of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's rise and Turkey's entry into the modern world, Louis de Brunier creates a whole world, then throws it into the whirlpool of the twentieth century. A wingless bird, a mesmerizing epic.