"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

"Suddenly, I had to rethink what I thought I knew. . . . I had to unlearn. What Andrić’s novel did for me at that young age was to shake years of nationalistic education, and whisper into my ears: 'Have you ever considered the story from the point of view of the Other?'"

Elif Shafak | New Statesman

"Three hundred years of Serbo-Croatian patriotism, recreated dramatically, passionately . . .  in episodes centering on a town and a stone bridge that link Bosnia and Serbia."

New York Times

"A great book."

Annie Proulx, | New York Times Book Review

"[Reads] as if it were not composed but grew out of the soil and the climate, like a ballad, to become part of the national heritage."

Stoyan Christowe | New York Times

“A remarkable historical novel."

Des Moines Sunday Register