When the construction of a bridge built to link the Balkans to Europe is repeatedly and mysteriously sabotaged, an old ballad starts making the rounds at local taverns. The bards sing of a legend – a woman immured in a castle wall to prevent it from falling. Some say the bridge is being damaged by local ferrymen, others blame the vengeful water spirits. But this is a town where terror and superstition reign and a solution must be reached. So it is decreed: a willing person must be plastered into the bridge...

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The year: 1377. The place: the Balkan peninsula. Here in Ismail Kadare's novel, The Three-Arched Bridge, an Albanian monk chronicles the events surrounding the construction of a bridge across a great river known as Ujana e Keqe, or "Wicked Waters". If successful in their endeavour, the bridge-builders will challenge a monopoly on water transportation known simply as "Boats and Rafts". The story itself parallels developments in modern-day Eastern Europe, with the bridge emblematic of a disintegrating economic and political order: just as mysterious cracks in the span's masonry endanger the structure and cast the local community into a morass of uncertainty, superstition and murder, so the fast-changing conditions in the 14th-century Balkan peninsula threaten to overwhelm the stability of life there. Dark as the story itself is, Mr. Kadare's prose, skilfully translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson, is elegant, witty and deft. And with so many twists and turns in its carefully constructed plot, this political parable keeps the reader's interest to the very end.

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