Novel Land.(Book Reviews)(Birds Without Wings)(Snow)(Book Review)

Turkey is a novelist's dream, or perhaps a land dreamed by a novelist. A border country between Europe and the Middle East, it has for centuries been so many things to so many people--Christians, Muslims, Armenians, Greeks and, of course, Turks--that it has become a place where fantasies and realities collide like tectonic plates. Everybody has a story, and, as two new novels set in Turkey demonstrate, every story is startlingly unique.

In "Birds Without Wings," Louis de Bernieres tackles a piece of Turkish history with the same vigor that he used to sketch World War II Greece in "Corelli's Mandolin." But this is a darker book, with no central love affair to soften its tragedy. Near the beginning, de Bernieres introduces Philothei, his fictional village's most beautiful woman. Like Eskibahce, the village she inhabits, Philothei is notable for nothing but her beauty; both are doomed. By the end of "Birds Without Wings," Eskibahce has been decimated by World War I and its aftermath. What had been a patchwork paradise of ethnicities--Greeks, Turks and Armenians--is gone, sacrificed for modern Turkey, forged by the ruthless Kemal Ataturk out of ...