De Bernières's sweeping novel follows the destruction of a mixed Greek-Turkish community in a fictional village on the Turquoise Coast — the kind of place Antalya's hinterland once contained in abundance — during the years of the First World War and its aftermath. The characters flee, fight, and mostly die in the wars of the period; those who survive are forcibly separated by the population exchanges of 1923.
It is a generous, heartbroken book that explains better than any history text how the Turkey of today came to be Turkish-only, and why the ruins of Byzantine churches sit in every village on this coast.