Granta (February 2017)

Greywolf Press (September 2017)

 

BBC BOOK OF THE WEEK 27 Feb - 1 March 2017

 

‘The literature of place is crying out for a talent as magical, brilliant and original as Kapka Kassabova's. She writes with taut intelligence and poetic intensity, a shrew and grown-up worldliness and rapt sense of all that isn't in the world. When Border arrived in my life, I felt as if I'd been struck by lightning.’

 

Pico Iyer

 

 

‘In Kassabova’s study, these tragic borderlands are brought to life with poetic grace, and her interaction with their inhabitants confers a haunting power on her journey.’

 

Colin Thubron

 

 

‘This book hums with the mystery, superstition, and terrible beauty of a place crushed between man-made borders but also defiantly announcing its sacred otherness. I can’t stop thinking about it’

 

Frances Stonor Saunders

 

 

“Remarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free. An effect achieved by the way she moves between literary borders so gracefully: travelogue and existential drama; political history and poetry.”

 

Peter Pomerantsev