Love and conflict in the Mediterranean
Overlooking the Aegean in the small fishing town of Eskibahce on the southwest coast of Turkey, the Christian Greeks have lived alongside the Muslim Turks for hundreds of years. Still distinct but intertwined, Muslim midwives, Christian priests, Turkish imams and Greek tutors minister to each other’s flock without division.
Then the events of the early 20th century like giant magnets pull everything out of kilter, and when the simple love of the Muslim goatherd for the beautiful Christian girl goes tragically wrong, whose fault is it?
Just as in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, his previous Mediterranean-set novel, de Bernieres mixes the political and the farcical, the romantic and the prosaic, and leaves us to choose between the inevitable and the cock-up as determining the course of history.
