To say that The Saga of a Seagull is about an eleven-year-old boy who adopts as a pet a young seagull with a broken wing might suggest some embarrassing piece of sentimental whimsy built on the child-plus-animal formula. Alternatively, it might suggest a modish, cynically ghoulish reversal of the predictable formula. The opening, in which the boy Salih first finds a small dead coot on the beach and immediately afterwards discovers the damaged "baby seagull", does make for uneasy reading, since the child's naïve philosophizing about death, and the repetitions of the word "baby", have an ominously gooey ring to them. Similarly, repeated mentions of "the little town" are far from reassuring because of the fairytale nuance of "little" in this context. Is the formula going to triumph hands down over Kemal? Fortunately not, although he does walk an emotional tightrope none too steadily for the first...