On a summer morning in Sarajevo almost a hundred years ago, a teenager took a pistol out of his pocket and fired not just the opening rounds of the First World War but the starting gun for modern history. By killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, started a cycle of events that would leave 15 million dead from fighting between 1914 and 1918. But Princip's impact did not stop when the guns fell silent. The turmoil of the War proved fatal for empires and a way of ruling that had held for centuries, fomenting mass social change from which grew some of the defining historical movements of the twentieth century. The Trigger tells the story of a young man who changed the world forever. It focuses on the drama of the incident itself by following the killer's journey, one that transformed Princip from a penniless backwoodsman to the most devastating assassin of modern times. By retracing his steps from the feudal frontier village of his birth, through the mountains of the northern Balkans to the great plain city of Belgrade and ultimately Sarajevo, Tim Butcher illuminates our understanding of Princip u both the person and the place that shaped him u and makes discoveries about him that have eluded historians for a hundred years. Travelling through the Balkans on Princip's trail, and drawing on his own experiences there as a war reporter during the war of the 1990s, Tim unravels this complex part of the world and its conflicts, and shows how the events that were sparked that day in June 1914 still have influence today.

Part whodunit, part travelogue, part history, The Trigger is a rich and timely work that uses the excitement of Princip's story to tease out the First World War's origins and other key dramas born of his homeland. Enlightening, accessible and important u it is a unique way in to a man and his country.