A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week
Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two vast lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that seem to hold both the turbulent memories of the region's past, and the secret of its enduring allure. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family.
As she journeys to her grandmother's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a civilisational crossroads. The Lakes are set within the mountainous borderlands of North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, and crowned by the old Roman road, the via Egnatia. Once a trading and spiritual nexus of the southern Balkans, this lake region remains one of Eurasia's most culturally diverse areas. Meanwhile, with their remote rock churches, changeable currents, and large population of migratory birds, the Lakes live in their own time.
By exploring on water and land the stories of poets, fishermen, and caretakers, misfits, rulers, and inheritors of war and exile, Kassabova uncovers the human history shaped by the Lakes. Setting out to resolve her own ancestral legacy of the Lakes, Kassabova's journey unfolds to a deeper enquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations, and confronts her with questions about human suffering and the capacity for change.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
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 *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Maße
Höhe: 216 mm
Breite: 135 mm
Dicke: 24 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-78378-397-7 (9781783783977)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
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
