Synopsis (Credit: www.randomhouse.co.uk)

In his first novel since Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernières creates a world, populates it with characters as real as our best friends, and launches it into the maelstrom of twentieth-century history.

The setting is a small village in southwestern Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Everyone there speaks Turkish, though they write it in Greek letters. It's a place that has room for a professional blasphemer; where a broken-hearted aga finds solace in the arms of a Circassian courtesan who isn't Circassian at all; where a beautiful Christian girl named Philothei is engaged to a Muslim boy named Ibrahim. But all of this will change when Turkey enters the modern world.

Costa Book of the Year 2004.

(Bought second-hand at Help the Rural Child Charity Bookshop, Victoria Road, Mowbray.)

An epic tale of how the lives of ordinary people are affected by world events. Well written, with gems of wisdom and observation throughout. The book would have benefited from some final editing to cut unnecessary repetition and to tighten up the storyline, but it forever changed the way I think of that part of the world.

I encountered this first as an unabridged audiobook, beautifully read by Christopher Kay. I discussed it with and recommended it to a friend besotted with Turkish history and busy preparing for another visit there. So, when I saw the book in the bookshop today, it simply had to come home with me.

Given to a friend and potential bookcrosser on her way to (re-)visit Turkey. This must be just about the only book ever written about the region she hasn't read yet.