Louis de Bernières was born in London in 1954 and joined the army at 18, but left after spending four months at Sandhurst. He was selected as one of the Granta twenty Best of Young British Novelists in 1993. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, his fourth novel, won a Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1995 and has sold 2.4 million copies.
Set against the background of the collapsing Ottoman empire, the Gallipoli campaign, and the subsequent bitter struggle between Greeks and Turks, Birds Without Wings traces the fortunes of one small community in South West Anatolia – a community in which Christian and Moslem lives and traditions have co-existed peacefully over the centuries and in which friendship, even love, can transcend religious differences.
