Ivo Andric - Böcker

In the Bosnian town of Visegrad, a stone bridge commissioned in the sixteenth century becomes the centre of three centuries of Balkan history.Built under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, the bridge at Visegrad at first unites a divided town. Generations gather on its arches: traders, soldiers, children, lovers, and gamblers, each leaving their mark as empires rise and fall.As Ottoman rule gives way to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, daily life shifts under new laws, new loyalties and growing nationalist tensions. Through characters such as Radisav, who resists the bridge’s construction, and Fata, who leaps from its parapet rather than submit to marriage, The Bridge Over the Drina traces the intimate dramas that unfold against imperial control.When the collision of forces in the Balkans ignites the First World War in 1914, the bridge that has endured centuries of occupation and upheaval finally faces destruction.The Bridge Over the Drina reveals how ordinary lives are shaped, divided, and bound together by the pressures of empire.

'By the time I finished it something in me had shifted forever' Elif Shafak, New StatesmanThere is no hero or heroine in this book. Instead, there is a bridge, and there are the characters that have loved it, hated it, built it or tried to destroy it. Ivo Andric, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, grew up beside it.For more than four hundred years a bridge has spanned the River Drina in Bosnia. This novel is its chronicle. Radisav, a workman, tries to hinder its construction and is impaled alive on its highest point. Beautiful Fata leaps from its parapet to escape an arranged marriage. Milan, inveterate gamble, risks all in one last game on it. Spanning generations, nationalities, creeds, and a great stretch of green water, the bridge bears witness to the lives played out on it, connections forged and 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. 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.