Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe Paperback – September 5, 2017

Visit the ‘doormat of Europe, or Asia’, depending on your direction of travel. The author revisits the borders of her childhood in Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey in a very personal journey that invites all of us along. Conquerors for centuries have used these lands as a route to feast on other civilizations. Highly reminiscent of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s travels through old Europe between the World Wars.

Good read.

Let me start by admitting that the writers I admire include Michael Ondaatje, Anthony Doerr, Tia Obrecht, Louis de Bernieres (every other book, Michael Chabon) and, of course, Garcia Marquez. Kapka Kassabova is not there yet but she is getting closer with each book. Borders is stunning in its evocation of the land and the denizens of this dark and dangerous part of the world - the moving boundaries where Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria have, for centuries, met.Having lived in northern Greece and visited Bulgaria about the time Kassabova was born there, I can attest to the all that she describes lurking in the shadows. But Kassabova has a brilliance not only in bringing the soul of a place into language but also describing with great depth and understanding the darkness and the himanity and humor of the various characters she met in her travels there.Read this book (of her equally impressive book on tango called Twelve Minutes of Love) even if you never go anywhere near this part of the world. It is about roots and danger and history and the resiliency of the human spirit.

Brilliant. Beautifully written. One of the best books I've read this year.Kassabova has a poet's eye for landscape, an instinct for finding exactly the right people, and the ability to fade into the background to let their stories shine through, all while shading her journey with her own stories and questions. It's a delicate balance.She introduces her readers to a fascinating but little-known part of Europe: that strange and often overrun corner where the borders of Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece meet, and where rusting barbed wire and abandoned guard towers are being slowly consumed by forests and mountains that slide into the Black Sea.But Kassabova doesn't just straddle these physical borders. Her story also straddles the borders of mystery and superstition, and the unexplainable events that can happen in a place as marginal as this.Highly recommended.

This read was a fascinating journey indeed! I learned so much, but from the inside, as though I was experiencing the places and events from within the author and the individuals who people her travels and the historical background she provides. The hours I spent on the “borders” were engaged, educational and emotional. I highly recommend this unusual book.

Very readable for the most part; incredibly sobering to a grreat extent. Made me very thankful to be living in the south Pacific. The author, now domiciled in Scotland, made a prolonged exploratiom of the terrain of her origins.. Gave me a good understanding of the basis of a common joke when I was a youth in the UK - viz acquaintance greets one with fake alarm - "Have you heard the news!? --There's trouble in the Balcans!" Yes, right. In the book Kapka meets and bonds with some very interesting, mostly rustic people of various nationalities,both real and forcibly modified, , and almost all living fractured lives under the boot heals of various military, In New Zealand we have a much over used word - resilience - used to extol our earthquake aurvival ability, but really we have nothing on the inhabitants of the border country of the book, who have survived generations of mass upheaval, invulluntary exile, and milittary domination by armies of several nations. So yes, a good book, but I got tired of the superntatural element which was, to me, well, tiresome.

As a native Bulgarian living abroad, this book brings me back home. After reading it, I visited Strandja for myself (first time). This place is ancient. I'm just on love with it. Thank you, Kapka, for putting the magic of Strandja on paper so well.

Liked this book as travelogue, but less so when it veered into history and drew conclusions from it. Factual errors coupled with some clear biases had me skipping those parts midway through to the end. That said, is great read on region, people and places that the author encounters during her travels.