West wrote on the brink of World War II, when she was 'already convinced of the inevitability of the second Anglo-German war.' The resulting book is colored by that impending conflict, and by West's search for universals amid the complex particulars of Balkan history.

What she saw there affected her so much that she had to return-partly, she writes, because it most resembled 'the country I have always seen between sleeping and waking,' and partly because 'it was like picking up a strand of wool that would lead me out of a labyrinth in which, to my surprise, I had found myself immured.' Black Lamb is the chronicle of her travels, but above all it is West following that strand of wool: through countless historical digressions through winding narratives of battles, slavery, and assassinations through Shakespeare and Augustine and into the very heart of human frailty. West visited Yugoslavia for the first time in 1936. But what makes it so unlikely to be confused with any other book of history, politics, or culture-with, in fact, any other book-is its unashamed depth of feeling: think The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire crossed with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Part travelogue, part history, part love letter on a thousand-page scale, Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a genre-bending masterwork written in elegant prose. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Rebecca West is the author of nonfiction works such as 'The Meaning of Treason' and 'A Train of Powder', and works of fiction including 'The Thinking Reed', 'The Fountain Overflows' and 'The Birds Fall Down'. It is being re-published half a century later during equally critical times for the people of the Balkans. The book was completed as Yugoslavia was plunged into political turmoil, followed by invasion and four years of merciless civil and partisan warfare. The book also includes the author's views on religion, ethics, art, myth and gender.

But the book became a historical, archaeological and political analysis of the country, as well as a conversation and an account of folklore, prophecy, and a record of landscape. At first, she thought it was folly to consider a book on such a subject and it seems that her publishers thought so too. First appearing in two volumes in 1942, this book was written as a result of the author's three journeys to Yugoslavia: one in 1936, another in 1937 and finally, in the summer of 1938.

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