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. Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, The Bridge on the Drina brilliantly illuminates a succession of lives that swirl around the majestic stone arches. Among them is that of the bridge's builder, a Serb kidnapped as a boy by the Ottomans; years later, as the empire's Grand Vezir, he decides to construct a bridge at the spot where he was parted from his mother. A workman named Radisav tries to hinder the construction, with horrific consequences. Later, the beautiful young Fata climbs the bridge's parapet to escape an arranged marriage, and, later still, an inveterate gambler named Milan risks everything on it in one final game with the devil. 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.

In the 16th century a stone bridge was built over the river Drina in the small town of Vishegrad in what is now Bosnia. It survived centuries of turmoil in the region before being destroyed in the First World War. In Nobel laureate Andric’s novel the bridge bear silent witness to the region’s troubled history. In a sequence of interconnected stories taken from different periods in the bridge’s history , Andric builds up his narrative of the continuities and changes in the region, and of the fluctuating relationships between different ethnic and religious groups. The bridge endures the centuries, overshadowing the ephemeral lives of the town’s people. It survives to connect or separate generations of Muslims, Christians and Jews engaged in daily toil and, often, bloody conflict. The Bridge on the Drina is both a remarkable work of historical fiction and a moving, understated plea for tolerance and understanding.

The Bridge on the Drina is a vivid depiction of the suffering history has imposed upon the people of Bosnia from the late 16th century to the beginning of World War I. As we seek to make sense of the current nightmare in this region, this remarkable, timely book serves as a reliable guide to its people and history. "No better introduction to the study of Balkan and Ottoman history exists, nor do I know of any work of fiction that more persuasively introduces the reader to a civilization other than our own. It is an intellectual and emotional adventure to encounter the Ottoman world through Andric's pages in its grandiose beginning and at its tottering finale. It is, in short, a marvelous work, a masterpiece, and very much sui generis. . . . Andric's sensitive portrait of social change in distant Bosnia has revelatory force."-William H. McNeill, from the introduction "The dreadful events occurring in Sarajevo over the past several months turn my mind to a remarkable historical novel from the land we used to call Yugoslavia, Ivo Andric's The Bridge on the Drina."-John M. Mohan, Des Moines Sunday Register Born in Bosnia, Ivo Andric (1892-1975) was a distinguished diplomat and novelist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. His books include The Damned Yard: And Other Stories, and The Days of the Consuls.