A long, leisurely story about early 20th century Anatolia. I enjoyed this more than Corelli's Mandolin, maybe because this has not been made into a movie, that I know of. The characters are the same sort of quaint villagers that you follow from childhood on.
Historical fiction with a heavy dose of history. It's set in early 20th century Anatolia, in a fictional village with a mixture of Turks, Greeks, and Armenians. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the history of that era can guess the plot from there.