Date Finished: 24 August 2014
Rating: 5*
Beautifully insightful, inspiring and deeply moving, ‘Birds
Without Wings’ could very easily have been one of the best books I’ve read this
year.
Although I’ve only read one other of Louis de Bernieres’s
books –‘Notwithstanding’, which I thoroughly enjoyed at age thirteen, but on
hindsight might have to reread it in order to fully understand its depth – I
think that after reading ‘Birds Without Wings’, he’s quickly jumped to the top
of my list of favourite authors. His writing is stunning, and I can’t seem to
get nearly enough of it. He makes it seem so effortless to write a six
hundred-page novel about the supposedly ordinary lives of insignificant people
in an almost forgotten community.
De Bernieres weaves the lives of his characters expertly,
inspiring in the reader a deep empathy for a community so incredibly lost in
stupendous ignorance of the outside world that Greeks and Turks are able to live
together peacefully, despite their religious and cultural differences. The
careful crafting of the story and witty humour interspersed with gasp-worthy
moments of scandal and excitement creates a flow of events that makes the novel
unbearable to be put down. I have a feeling that the characters and their
separate narratives will haunt my dreams for months, but I can’t find it in
myself to shudder at the thought of this.
‘Birds Without Wings’ is phenomenal, and I highly, highly
recommend it, but only to people who are able to set aside several days of
doing nothing other than reading, and then a further day or two to recover and
shed a couple of tears.
nice cover!
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