Omer Pasha Latas

<b>A sweeping epic by Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andri&#263; about power identity and Islam set in 19th-century Ottoman Bosnia and Istanbul.</b><br><br><i>Omer Pasha Latas</i> is set in nineteenth-century Sarajevo where Muslims and Christians live in uneasy proximity while entertaining a common resentment of faraway Ottoman rule. Omer is the seraskier commander in chief of the Sultan&#146;s armies and as the book begins he arrives from Istanbul dispatched to bring Sarajevo&#146;s landowners to heel a task that he accomplishes with his usual ferocity and efficiency. And yet the seraskier&#146;s expedition to Bosnia is a time of reckoning for him as well: he was born in the Balkans a Serb and a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire a bright boy who escaped his father&#146;s financial disgrace by running away and converting to Islam. Now at the height of his power he heads an army of misfits adventurers and outcasts from across Europe and Asia and yet wherever he goes he remains a stranger. <br><br>Ivo Andri&#263; who won the Nobel Prize in 1961 is a spellbinding storyteller and a magnificent stylist and here in his final novel he surrounds his enigmatic central figure with many vivid and fascinating minor characters lost souls and hopeless dreamers all in a world that is slowly sliding towards disaster. <i>Omer Pasha Latas</i> combines the leisurely melancholy of Joseph Roth&#146;s <i>The Radetzky March</i> with the stark fatalism of an old ballad.