Kassabova - Border: a Journey to the Edge of Europe

This is a dazzling work of art and reportage, an iridescent book, glittering with stories of horror, comedy and actual magic. Kassabova is a brilliant traveller, an astonishing interviewer and writer with a near clairvoyant understanding of the real lives of men and women. Border is a gripping and revelatory story of the meeting of Asia and Europe in which every page seems to uncover historical and human secrets. Kassabova follows some fierce, sorcerous current which carries us all towards frontiers; there is an urgent and engrossing story here.

Horatio Clare

The literature of place is crying out for a talent as magical, brilliant, and original as Kapka Kassabovas. She writes with taut intelligence and poetic intensity, a shrewd and grown-up worldliness, and a rapt sense of all that isnt in the world, a combination that Ive been longing for this entire century. When Border arrived in my life, I felt as if Id been struck by lightning.

Pico Iyer

Kapka Kassabova writes with such energy and style that you feel she could visit the dullest place on earth and make it burst into life. But she has found somewhere extraordinary, the borderland between Greece and Bulgaria and Turkeyone of historys well-worn playgrounds. The individual stories she tellsby turns dramatic and poignant, tragic and comicare played out against a ceaseless round of brutal wars and shifting empires. Border is a brilliant and hugely satisfying book.

Philip Marsden

She has achieved something remarkable: a book about borders which 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, author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

Like the places it describes, this book holds you in a kind of mysterious electrical charge. It hums with the mystery, superstition, and terrible beauty of a place crushed between man-made borders but also defiantly announcing its sacred otherness. I cant stop thinking about it.

Frances Stonor Saunders

A marvelous book. Kassabova, a poet, writes lyrically and effectively about the astonishing natural beauty of much of the area. It shows more starkly than anything else I have read what the border did to the people who lived along it, and how its legacy endures.

The Guardian

With the deft touch of a historian, [Kassabova] connects the voices of those who have struggled to cross borders across the centuries. Kassabova is a poet, and her writing is beautifulmoving and witty by turns. In a world ever more divided, ever more threatened by Mexican walls, restrictive new passports and fear of the unknown, we need books like this.

Financial Times

[Kassabova] has the travel-writers core skill of acute sensitivity to her physical environment, together with a poets turn of phrase and a poets emotional rawness. Her journey takes place as the human flow from the Middle East was becoming a hemorrhage, and refugees appear in the narrative like phantoms. Kassabova is, above all, sensationally good at meeting extraordinary people, and that is surely the travels writers essential skill. Aromatic, lyrical, disturbingand very, very fine.

The Sunday Times

Kapka Kassabovas poignant, erudite and witty [ Border ] brings hidden history vividly to light. Communities with roots going back centuries were pulled up and dumped across borders that had once hardly mattered, into countries that they scarcely knew. It is a melancholy miracle, writes Ms. Kassabova, that odd ragged bits of this once-rich human tapestry survive. They could have no better chronicler.

The Economist

[Kassabovas] hunger and a fascination with this little known region has resulted in Border , one of those books that elevates travel writing to art. Mystery, of course, is at the heart of her book. The mystery of marginal points and marginal people.

The Herald

[A] thoughtful and impressive volume. Kassabova draws artfully on Slavic folklore, ancient customs such as fire walking, myths involving Uzbek-bred vipers and snippets of history. She has an old-fashioned gift for storytelling. Border brilliantly reveals the effects of a millennium of kaleidoscopic shifting.

The Observer

The poet and travel writers beautiful, tragic and universal new book may just be the most important you read in this year of Brexit. Kassabovas two-year odyssey lays bare the opposing injustices of empire and nationalism. A timely work, as nationalism raises its head once more across Europe. It forces us to consider the very concept of hard borders.

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