Ayvalık and the northern Aegean coast feature in several works that illuminate the region's complicated Greek-Turkish history and the trauma of the 1923 population exchange.
Farewell Anatolia by Dido Sotiriou (1962) is set partly in this stretch of the Aegean coastline and draws on the experience of the Greek communities uprooted during the exchange. It remains one of the most widely read accounts of that displacement, written from the Greek perspective.
Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières (2004) is set in a fictional Anatolian village but deals with the same period — the dissolution of the Ottoman world and the violence surrounding the Turkish War of Independence. It offers context for what the old stone houses of Ayvalık once contained.
The Bozburun Peninsula and broader Aegean Turkey sections of any current edition of the Rough Guide to Turkey or Lonely Planet Turkey include practical coverage of Ayvalık along with background on the Greek heritage towns of the northern Aegean.