Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan

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

This previously untranslated historical novel by the Nobel Prize–winner Andrić tells the story of Omer Pasha Latas, born Mihailo Latas, a Serbian Christian who rose to a position of power in the Ottoman Empire. When Mihailo’s chances of a military career in Austria fail, he flees across the border into Ottoman Bosnia, converts to Islam, and makes his way to Istanbul where his exceptional intelligence and qualities as a potential military leader are recognized by the sultan. Having distinguished himself in mercilessly suppressing uprisings in Albania, Syria, and Kurdistan, and subsequently in Montenegro, Herzegovina, and Albania, Omer Pasha is sent to Bosnia in 1850 to quell resistance by local landowners to modernizing reforms. Now in the land of his fathers, Omer Pasha’s display and misuse of power is all the more urgent but also more complex. Along with an exquisitely drawn array of local characters, Ivo Andrić portrays a man who is both supremely arrogant and pitifully vulnerable, and a city in the grip of fear.