Byron and the Beauty is very loosely based on Byron's biography and takes place during two weeks of October 1809, during his visit to the Balkans. Besides being great love story, this is also a novel about East and West, about Europe and the Balkans, about travel and friendship and cruelty. Bazdulj marvellously combines facts with imagination, history and romance, resulting in an exceptionally beautiful novel. Lord Byron ends up experiencing and embodying the lyrical Balkan condition of unrequited love called sevdah, but his valiant behavior also lands him in a regional folk song; this nod to changing cultural production in the Ottoman lands calls to mind the works of Ismail Kadare. Bazdulj's keen eye seeks out just the right amount of detail to construct a bracing atmosphere for the reader, who will encounter in the book some memorable and key elements of Albanian, Bosnian, and Turkish thought and everyday life. From coffee to customary law, from courtship rituals to the culture of conversation, Byron navigates the invigorating culture of the Balkans with the help of his Muslim and Jewish guides.Connoisseurs of Byron studies will find here an exciting reworking of the great poet's youth and also ample reflections on his world view and literary influences.

A Jesuit and an English ambassador make a journey to Petrograd across a gloomy, often desolate eighteenth-century Eastern Europe in order to sight a rare transit of the sun by Venus. A Moldovan student coming of age at the end of the twentieth century, and in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's break-up, flees to the west in search of a less gloomy life, only to find more of the sordid, inhumane experience she had hoped to leave behind. A boy known only as the Writer, under the sway of Paul Auster's novels, searches for his theme and finally settles on an eighteenth-century Yugoslav Jesuit known for his fascination with rare astronomical events. In these subtly linked novellas, Muharem Bazdulj takes the reader across several centuries of Yugoslav history, finding in three very different sets of circumstances a common longing to escape the desperation and depression of life in the east.