In the village of Eskibahçe in southwestern Anatolia, Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks share wells, festivals and a speech stitched together from both tongues. Louis de Bernières sets his 2004 novel there, in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, and lets the village talk for itself: potters, priests, imams, landowners and children take the narration in turn, so the place assembles out of gossip and memory rather than one omniscient account.

Two strands run through it. One follows Philothei, a Christian girl, and Ibrahim, the Muslim boy promised to her since childhood. The other tracks Mustafa Kemal Atatürk from a provincial boyhood toward the founding of a Turkish nation, chapters written as sober biography against the villagers' ordinary days.

De Bernières writes the First World War trenches in unsparing detail, then follows the Greco-Turkish War as it reaches communities like this one, with expulsions and massacres ending centuries of shared life in Anatolia. The novel names the engines plainly, religious intolerance and a zealous new nationalism, and keeps the villagers where they stood, inside tides they never chose.

Readers of Captain Corelli's Mandolin will meet a few familiar names; the two novels share a subject and a method without forming a series. Iskander the Potter gives the book its title: man is a bird without wings, and a bird is a man without sorrows.