Kapka Kassabova: 6 books

The novelist, poet, and travel writer offers “a meandering, bittersweet journey” of a memoir about growing up, leaving, and returning to her homeland (Publishers Weekly). Kapka Kassabova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. In the last decades of the cold war, she grew up under the muddy, grey...

After years on the outside, Bulgaria has finally made it into the EU club, but beyond the clichés about undrinkable plonk, cheap property, and assassins with poison-tipped umbrellas, the country remains a largely unknown quantity. Born on the muddy outskirts of Sofia, Kapka Kassabova grew up under...

“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...

Kapka Kassabova first set foot in a tango studio ten years ago and, from that moment, she was hooked. With the beat of tango driving her on and the music filling her head, she's danced across the world, from Auckland to Edinburgh, from Berlin to Buenos Aires, putting in hours of practice for fleeting...

Tangled with darkness like its lush, decaying setting, Villa Pacifica had me gripped to the very end.'Emily Perkins A couple arrive in a dead-end coastal village somewhere in South America. The only place to stay is Villa Pacifica, part hotel and part animal sanctuary run by eccentric ex-pats. Travel...

All Roads Lead to the Sea is a first collection of poetry from a young Bulgarian immigrant poet. Her work had already attracted considerable attention, with a special issue of Poetry New Zealand featuring her poems. Her moody, evocative poems brilliantly convey the rootlessness and restlessness of...