The Bridge Over the Drina
Ivo Andric
  • Published: 1 August 2002
  • ISBN: 9781860460586
  • Imprint: Harvill Press
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

The Bridge Over the Drina

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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, The Bridge Over the Drina won Andric the Nobel Prize for Literature

In the small Bosnian town of Visegrad the stone bridge of the novel's title, built in the sixteenth century on the instruction of a grand vezir, bears witness to three centuries of conflict. Visegrad has long been a bone of contention between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but the bridge survives unscathed until 1914, when the collision of forces in the Balkans triggers the outbreak of World War I.

The bridge spans generations, nationalities and creeds, silent testament to the lives played out on it. 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. With humour and compassion, Andric chronicles the lives of Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox Christians unable to reconcile their disparate loyalties.
  • Published: 1 August 2002
  • ISBN: 9781860460586
  • Imprint: Harvill Press
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

About the author

Ivo Andric

Ivo Andric was born in 1892 in Travnik, Bosnia of Croat parents and grew up alongside Orthodox Christians, Moslems and Roman Catholics in Višegrad, the town on the banks of the Drina where his book is set. Until 1941 he served as a Yugoslav diplomat, then, placed under house arrest in Belgrade by the occupying Germans, Andric turned to writing. In 1961 he was awarded the Noble prize for literature. He died in 1975.

Also by Ivo Andric

The Bridge on the Drina
Omer Pasha Latas
Bosnian Chronicle
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Praise for The Bridge Over the Drina

The wealth and variety of its fictional elements carry it so far beyond the confines of a straightforward novel, it cannot be limited to such a description. It puts one in mind of a collection of tales, but no collection of tales (not even A Thousand and One Nights or Washington Irving's stories) ever possessed such a unity and continuity of theme

George Perec, Le Monde

The best kind of fictionalised history

Daily Telegraph

Andric possess the rare gift in a historical novelist of creating a period-piece, full of local colour, and at the same time characters who might have been living today

Times Literary Supplement

In high school, one Saturday, I started reading a book by the Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andric: The Bridge on the Drina. By the time I finished it something in me had shifted forever

Elif Shafak, New Statesman

Despite its scale, what makes the book extraordinary is the tender insight with which it treats these individual lives, whether Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim or Jewish

Fiona Sampson, Independent

Perhaps the most widely translated Yugoslav book since the last war is Ivo Andric's The Bridge on the Drina... No better example could have been selected with which to introduce the American public to contemporary Yugoslav prose

New York Times

Just as the bridge on the Drina brought East and West together so your work has acted as a link, combining the culture of your country with other parts of the planet

Göran Liljestrand, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences member
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