The Mountain

John Anderson is an American journalist in Yugoslavia covering the Croatian War of Independence when he discovers just a few days before a Serbian invasion that his musician wife Anna had just ended a yearlong affair. He forgives her at first as they desperately plan their escape across a mountain and through a war zone, towards the safety of the Hungarian border.  

Only a few days later his distrust re-emerges when they meet a soldier who appears to flirt, and then disappear with her. In a fit of jealousy he abandons her altogether and ventures forth by himself on an odyssey of self-discovery. When he encounters a massacre in a small village he starts to wonder if he has made a grave mistake and unwittingly endangered her life.  Striken with guilt he desperately tries to find her and save her from the tragic fate he believes he helped create.

Like Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls in its portrayal of war and its effect on human relationships, but with a deeper sense of psychological introspection, The Mountain is the second part of the Andrássy út trilogy, a series of three thematically related novels about American protagonists in Eastern Europe exploring love and deception against the background of modern life.

One reviewer gave it 5 stars and said: 'This is a more than worthy follow up to the first novel in this series - a story about war and its affect on relationships as much as it is the personal path of self discovery for the protagonist...great writing too! "