Aleksandar Gatalica’s The Great War is a large, many-voiced novel of the First World War, moving across fronts, countries, classes, professions, and the personal disasters faced by its people.

Rather than narrowing the war into one tidy protagonist’s moral education, it follows a whole weather system of lives: soldiers, doctors, artists, generals, spies, civilians, the famous, the forgotten, and the half-crushed people history usually leaves in the margin. It’s an ambitious, restless historical novel: documentary in texture, literary in structure, and full of strange, vivid detail.

A strong pick for readers interested in European fiction, war writing, fragmented history, and novels that treat catastrophe not as a single event, but as something that enters music, families, bodies, politics, and the century after it.

First English-language edition, Istros Books paperback, 2014. Very good overall, with light cover and edge wear. Clean internally.