Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan-Fast Shipping

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A sweeping epic by Nobel Prize-winner Ivo Andrić about power, identity, and Islam set in 19th-century Ottoman Bosnia and Istanbul.

Omer Pasha Latas is set in nineteenth-century Sarajevo, whereMuslims and Christians live in uneasy proximity while entertaining acommon resentment of faraway Ottoman rule. Omer is the seraskier,commander in chief of the Sultan’s armies, and as the book begins hearrives from Istanbul, dispatched to bring Sarajevo’s landowners toheel, a task that he accomplishes with his usual ferocity andefficiency. And yet the seraskier’s expedition to Bosnia is a time ofreckoning for him as well: he was born in the Balkans, a Serb and asubject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a bright boy who escaped hisfather’s financial disgrace by running away and converting to , at the height of his power, he heads an army of misfits,adventurers, and outcasts from across Europe and Asia, and yet whereverhe goes he remains a stranger.

Ivo Andrić, 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. Omer Pasha Latas combines the leisurely melancholy of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March with the stark fatalism of an old ballad.