To the Lake

"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 * [An] extraordinarily haunting mixture of travelogue, history and family memoir...a delight, exquisitely written and brimming with compassion... [a] wonderful book * Sunday 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 Neatly adhering to rules of three, Kassabova's well-researched and personal book contains three strands: vivid travelogue, ancestral memoir and historical analysis... excellent... deft storytelling * New Statesman * 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 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 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 A beguiling mixture of memoir, travelogue and historical investigation... The book is marbled with memorable images * Scottish Sunday Times * An intimate portrait of loss * Wanderlust * Kassabova attempts to bring out... the quiet lives that get hidden by history... she is too good a writer not to allow us many individual pleasures... any writer who uses the marvellous word ""lacustrine"" - ""of the lake"" - deserves to be celebrated * Spectator * Enlightening, surprising and elegiac ... a joy to read... very elegantly written ... The actual descriptions of the lakes are written with a filigree grace, unostentatious, not overly ""poetic"", and with a sharp eye for telling detail... I always like books that I leave feeling bigger on the inside, and Kassabova certainly achieves that * Scotland on Sunday * Evocative... Kassabova is an excellent describer of nature... At times, Kassabova's prose seems to literally dissolve into poetry. Her narrative glides through different locations, time periods and perspectives so subtly that you don't quite realise the full scope of its ambition until it's over... You could open this book at any page and immediately get sucked into the beauty of her writing * Open Democracy *"