Description

In this masterpiece of historical fiction by the Nobel Prize-winning Yugoslavian author, a stone bridge in a small Bosnian town bears silent witness to three centuries of conflict.

The town of Visegrad was long caught between the warring Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but its sixteenth-century bridge survived unscathed until 1914 when tensions in the Balkans triggered the first World War. The Bridge on the Drina brilliantly illuminates the lives that swirl around the majestic stone arches, spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds. The bridge's builder is a Serbian who was kidnapped as a boy by the Ottomans and converted to Islam; he returns in old age as the empire's Grand Vizier, determined to build a bridge at the spot where he last saw his mother. A workman named Radisav tries to hinder its construction and is impaled alive on its highest point. Later the beautiful Fata leaps from its parapet to escape an arranged marriage, and later still an inveterate gambler named Milan risks all in one final game on it. With humor and compassion, Ivo Andric chronicles the ordinary Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians whose lives are connected by the bridge, in a land that has itself been a bridge between East and West for centuries.