Border by Kapka Kassabova

Border by Kapka Kassabova

"Remarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free." --Peter Pomerantsev

In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the "Red Riviera" on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime.

Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off.

Border is a scintillating, immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis troubling Europe, and a deep, witchy descent into interior and exterior geographies.

KAPKA KASSABOVA, who was born in Bulgaria in 1973 and now lives in Edinburgh, is a Bulgarian writer. She has published two volumes of poetry, two travel guides, numerous travel pieces, the book Villa Pacifica (2011), and the renowned memoir Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (2008). She has contributed to the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Vogue, and Granta.com, among other publications. www.twelveminutesoflove.com is a website dedicated to twelve minutes of love.