Why did Denis love this book?
This is a Nobel Prize for Literature-winning book that is a must-read for historical fiction enthusiasts.
Spanning some four hundred years, the centerpiece isn’t the usual high drama running across generations of a family but rather a bridge, the bridge over the river Drina.
The book is a surprisingly easy-to-read novel that follows periods in the lives of the peasants in a Bosnian town whose lives were marked by the bridge.
Through the telling of these stories, Andric subtly introduces the reader to the empires, religions, and cultures of the Balkans.
1 author picked The Bridge Over the Drina as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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…