Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan, Andric Ivo

Omer Pasha Latas is set in nineteenth-century Sarajevo, where Muslims and Christians live in uneasy proximity while entertaining a common resentment of faraway Ottoman rule. Omer is the seraskier, commander in chief of the Sultans armies, and as the book begins he arrives from Istanbul, dispatched to bring Sarajevos landowners to heel, a task that he accomplishes with his usual ferocity and efficiency. And yet the seraskiers expedition to Bosnia is a time of reckoning for him as well: he was born in the Balkans, a Serb and a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a bright boy who escaped his fathers financial disgrace by running away and converting to Islam. Now, at the height of his power, he heads an army of misfits, adventurers, and outcasts from across Europe and Asia, and yet wherever he goes he remains a stranger.