Elizabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown; she is f-ted, studied, honoured. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation and from which, it seems, she will never escape, she has reached...

Birds Without Wings tells of the inhabitants of a small coastal town in South West Anatolia in the dying days of the Ottoman empire: Iskander the Potter and fount of proverbial wisdom; Philothei, a Christian girl of legendary beauty who...