In an autobiographical novel that reads like memoir, Négovan Rajic recounts the final years of the Second World War and the year immediately afterwards from the viewpoint of a young resistance fighter in the former Yugoslavia. But this is not a war memoir, replete with grim details and grand, heroic gestures; the older Négovan’s life experiences — and his distance from the story — have given him a strong sense of irony.

Having survived the war, the young narrator of the novel returns to the country’s capital and enrolls in the Faculty of Engineering in the University of Belgrade only to discover that the political movement sweeping his country — and its leader, Tito, known in To the Far Shore as The Grand Master and The Master of the Keys — is undermining his education and the entire society in which he grew up. Realizing that his future was not to be found in his homeland, the young narrator takes a trip to see his father, explains himself, and then, together with a friend, plans his defection to Austria.

Born in 1923 in Belgrade, Négovan Rajic is the author of four previously published French language novels. Before he emigrated to France in 1947, he was interned in an Austrian prison camp. Living in Paris, he worked at several manual labour jobs, before studying to become a professor. Among other prizes, Négovan has received the Franz Kafka medallion of the European Circle of Prague. He has lived in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, since 1969.

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Nora Alleyn grew up in a bicultural family in Québec City. Following a B.A. in languages at McGill University, she joined the Department of External Affairs and lived in Europe and the Middle East. She studied translation at Laval, McGill and the Université de Montréal, and creative writing at the National University of Ireland (Galway), Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (University of Vermont), Summer Film Institute (Massachussetts), and West Word (UBC).

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“Rajic excels at sinister detail … Rajic supplies satisfying sensual detail … To the Far Shore commands respect as a document of wisdom.”

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“Heartbreakingly beautiful and poetic.”

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