"Great historical novels–and there aren't many–generally don't read as if they're historical. You feel, reading them, that you're inside their time and place. Their characters aren't dressed up in period costume, eating (carefully researched period meals; their lives are real lives, like our own, only taking place int he past. In other words, they're true to life as we know and feel it, and their texture seems completely natural, however remote or unfamiliar the setting may be....How astonishing, then, to come unexpectedly upon a master of the genre–and one who's been hiding in full view for almost sixty years....This extraordinary book constitutes the story of Bosnia in a series of highly dramatic episodes centered on the magnificent white stone bridge built by an early vizier."– "The New York Review of Books"
