Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe

Product Description Winner of the the British Academy Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2018 Winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2017 Winner of the 2017 Highland Book Prize Winner of the Saltire Society Book of the Year 2017 Shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018 Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2017 Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize 2017 Shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award 2018 Shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2017 Shortlisted for the National Circle of Critics Award 2017 When Kapka Kassabova was a child, the borderzone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece was rumoured to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall so it swarmed with soldiers, spies and fugitives. On holidays close to the border on the Black Sea coast, she remembers playing on the beach, only miles from where an electrified fence bristled, its barbs pointing inwards toward the enemy: the holiday-makers, the potential escapees. Today, this densely forested landscape is no longer heavily militarised, but it is scarred by its past. In Border, Kapka Kassabova sets out on a journey to meet the people of this triple border - Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, and the latest wave of refugees fleeing conflict further afield. She discovers a region that has been shaped by the successive forces of history: by its own past migration crises, by communism, by two World wars, by the Ottoman Empire, and - older still - by the ancient legacy of myths and legends. As Kapka Kassabova explores this enigmatic region in the company of border guards and treasure hunters, entrepreneurs and botanists, psychic healers and ritual fire-walkers, refugees and smugglers, she traces the physical and psychological borders that criss-cross its villages and mountains, and goes in search of the stories that will unlock its secrets. Border is a sharply observed portrait of a little-known corner of Europe, and a fascinating meditation on the borderlines that exist between countries, between cultures, between people, and within each of us. Review 'A marvellous book about a magical part of the world... It shows more starkly than anything else I have read what the border did to the people who lives along it, and how its legacy endures... Kassabova, a poet, writes lyrically and effectively about the astonishing natural beauty of much of the area... as [she] arcs across countries and centuries in an effort to free herself from the enchantment of this strangest of regions. In the end she leaves, but the spell remains' -- Book of the Week, Guardian 'Like a sharp-eyed magpie, [Kassabova's] travels across the border in this place with three alphabets, picking up intriguing titbits of history and folklore... With a lightness of touch, [...] the tragedies, ironies and curiosities of this often-overlooked corner of Europe, with hotchpotch of peoples, are captured by Kassabova's vivid phrasings' -- The Times 'This smokily intense and quiveringly powerful travel book is about the wild, forested and tragic borderland between Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. Kassabova [...] has the travel-writer's core skill of acute sensitivity to her physical environment, together with a poet's turn of phrase and a poet's emotional rawness... Kassabova is, above all, sensationally good at meeting extraordinary people, and that is surely the travel writer's essential skill... [Border] is aromatic, lyrical, disturbing - and very, very fine' -- Sunday Times '[Kassabova] has an old-fashioned gift for storytelling... Border brilliantly reveals the effects of a millennium of kaleidoscopic shifting. Thoughtful and impressive' -- Observer 'With the deft touch of a historian, she connects the voices of those who have struggled to cross borders across the centuries... Kassabova is a poet, and her writing is beautiful - moving and witty by turns... In a world ever more divided, ever more threatened by Mexican walls, restrictive new passports and fear of