The sad tale of Sheikh Ahmed Nuruddin, the dervish of the title, deluded and self-serving, set during the Ottoman rule in 18th-century Bosnia. A volume in the series Writings from an Unbound Europe, Selimovic (1910-1982) is a bestselling Bosnian Muslim author. Translated from Serbo-Croatian, this big important book was first published in the 1960s in what was then Yugoslavia.  (BLK69, $24.00)