Birds Without
Wings
“Birds Without Wings is
a wise, beautiful and enthralling book.”
The
Mail on Sunday
“De Bernières’s narrative voice is
captivating and compelling … [He] deserves praise for
his imaginative sympathy, which enlarges the spirit … De
Bernières has written a masterpiece. Where Captain
Corelli’s Mandolin was the work of a romantic young
man, this is the sadder, grimmer novel of a mature writer, whose
rage at human cruelty and stupidity is Tolstoyan.”
The Independent on Sunday
“A book which is about the great and important things
in living – love, death, honour, failure and guilt – and
about the small things that are vital to those great things … Gently
humorous asides litter the book … This is a magnificent,
poetic, colossal novel, filled with wry, poignant stories … It’s
a beautiful mesmer of voices and people and events … Birds
Without Wings is superbly written, gathering people and
their hearts and souls and all their baggage of loss and hope
together in one place and giving a point to life. It is,
in every sense, a sublime book.”
The
Irish Times
“He evokes with absolute certainty and delicacy the texture
of daily life, whether that is the life of a small town and surrounding
countryside, or the life in the trenches of Gallipoli … it
is wonderfully vivid. There is love in the writing
of this novel, which is why so many will love it.”
The Scotsman
“Although his account of Gallipoli is inspired – rarely
has the ugly face of war been so lovingly described – his
heart belongs to the smaller canvas, and his portrayal of sleepy,
multi-ethnic village life before, during and after the First
World War is a magnificent achievement.”
The Times
“De Bernières allows a multitude of characters
to jostle for attention, at first to suggest the richness of
the community’s life, and then to register its erosion. … de
Bernières has a remarkable ability to evoke the tenderness
of relationships even as he depicts their brutality … he
can move seamlessly from energetic humour to poignancy, and from
easy charm to a searing anger.”
The Financial Times
“de Bernieres’ second Mediterranean epic mingles humour, horror
and humanity”
The
Independent
“…enchanting mix of love, horror, humour and despair… This
is a beautifully written, compelling and thought-provoking novel.”
Lincolnshire
Echo
“… an illustration of how religion and nationalism
can dehumanise people and lead them to commit heinous crimes. Salutary
reading in the wake of the Bosnian and Gulf wars.”
Glamour magazine
“he has recreated a lost world
at the point of its dissolution and realised the grandeur of
his themes: the endurance of love, the pity of war”
Hampstead & Highgate Express
“Louis de Bernières’s
most serious and ambitious achievement to date”
Times Literary Supplement
“Astonishing, compulsively readable… His characters
attach themselves to us and won’t let go.”
Los
Angeles Times
“Engrossing…The prose is gorgeous…Everyone
in this cast of characters is someone memorable, and their lives
and fates intertwine to make a marvellously engaging story of
a village.”
Chicago
Tribune
“A deeply rewarding work… A great bazaar of family life
and international politics… This epic about the tragedy of borders is
likely to cross all borders, moving readers everywhere… It’s both
exotically remote and tragically relevant in our age of confident nation building… So
much is remarkable about this novel, from the heft of its history
to the power of its legends.”
Christian
Science Monitor
“De Bernieres is so inventive – celebratory
but never sentimental”
Newsweek
“Fascinating, evocative…Rich and compelling…A
thrilling ride through a whirlwind of history…De Bernieres
has reached heights that few modern novelists ever attempt”
The
Washington Post
“We feel everything through a
host of vivid, moving and often amusing characters.”
San
Jose Mercury News
“He is to be understood as … a
prolific and ambitious writer with a rather astonishing body
of work, notable for its dense lyricism, fierce wisdom, soaring
passion and remarkable wit. In this tradition, Birds
Without Wings is
pure de Bernières. … this is again a rich
and passionate story of love and war, and in many ways a much
more ambitious and important one. … Stories of grand passions
move the novel: conjugal, fraternal, inter-species. Many
are delivered in an episodic, fragmentary and provocative manner,
interspersing voices in first and third person to create a rich,
mottled chorus, an amalgam of subplots that weave and complement
each other in such a way that the town itself might be better
called the central character.
For those who do not devour it immediately, Birds
Without Wings will sit as great epics sit, on one’s shelf demanding
to be read, making one feel irresponsible and guilty, provoking resolutions
of ‘must read this before death’. Do read it before you die. It
would be a terrible thing to have missed a work of such importance, beauty
and compassion.”
The
Globe and Mail, Canada
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