PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Kapka Kassabova is a poet, novelist and writer of narrative non-fiction. She grew up in Sofia, Bulgaria, and now lives in the Scottish Highlands. Her acclaimed memoirs Street Without a Name (2008) and Twelve Minutes of Love (2011) were followed by Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (2017) which won the British Academy's Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year, the Edward Stanford-Dolman Travel Book of the Year, and the inaugural Highlands Book Prize. It was short-listed for the Baillie-Gifford Prize. kapka-kassabova.net
To the Lake is an exquisitely written rallying cry to embrace the notion that the people of the Balkans-and indeed humanity as a whole-have more in common than what divides them, despite generations of strife suggesting otherwise * Financial Times * From the deep labyrinths of the Balkan past, Kapka Kassabova has returned with another hoard of extraordinary lives, tales of survival, dark comedy and horror. Humanity glitters under her gaze in all its facets. Her prose is spectacularly good and her storytelling is a joy * Philip Marsden * To the Lake's objective is not healing so much as reconciliation, a quest for spiritual wholeness... The book's achievement [...] is to reconcile, thrillingly, what those twin bodies of water represent to Kassabova: the unconscious and the conscious; the darkness of history and the radiance of life and love * Guardian * Kapka Kassabova made her name with a travel book about the turbulent lands on the fringes of the former Ottoman empire. Now she's back in the Balkans in search of her family history -- Best books of 2020 * Times * Kassabova is a brilliant traveller, an astonishing interviewer and a writer with near clairvoyant understanding of the real lives of men and women -- Horatio Clare Kassabova writes with such energy and style that you feel she could visit the dullest place on earth and still make it burst into life -- Philip Marsden From the deep labyrinths of the Balkan past, Kapka Kassabova has returned with another hoard of extraordinary lives, tales of survival, dark comedy and horror. Humanity glitters under her gaze in all its facets. Her prose is spectacularly good and her storytelling is a joy -- Philip Marsden A beguiling mixture of memoir, travelogue and historical investigation... The book is marbled with memorable images * Scottish Sunday Times * Enlightening, surprising and elegiac... Kassabova captures the paradox of this conglomeration of places deftly... A very elegantly written book * Scotsman * A superb fusion of personal, political and cultural history -- Books of the Year * Sunday Times * A fine book -- Books of the Year * Telegraph *
