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(Bulgarian Cover)
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Street Without a Name
(Portobello, July 2008 / Penguin NZ 2008 / Ciela Books, Bulgaria)
To be published in USA by Skyhorse in 2009
'A fascinating book – at once evocative, disturbing, and chock-a-block full of charm.’
Jan Morris
“Not many books on the travel shelves have the force of revelation, but this one does. Kapka Kassabova leads us into a country most of us have hardly read about with an elegant assurance, an acid wit and a heart-rending precision that can make you see the world quite differently. This book is a treasure.”
Pico Iyer
“Kapka Kassabova’s uncanny ability to recall her childhood perceptions in all their intense purity gives us a unique memoir of what it was like to grow up in a Communist satellite country. In the mosaic of books about the bad old days, this book is the piece that was always missing. Now we have it, and it shines.”
Clive James
“Kapka Kassabova’s poignant evocation of a childhood spent under one-party rule is complemented by her sharply observed and devastating account of her return to post-communist Bulgaria. Her skilful blend of memoir and travelogue offers a highly readable introduction to a rarely described corner of Europe.”
Vesna Goldsworthy
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Reviews
TLS
Guardian
Sunday Herald
The Times
NZ Herald
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Love In The Land Of Midas (Penguin NZ 2001)
'This is the sweeping and exuberantly youthful novel of an award-winning young author. It traces two tales of love: between a journalist, Pascal, and a left-wing resistance fighter, Daphne, in the Greek Civil War; and between two tourists - Pascal's granddaughter, Véronique, and an Australian student, Theo, in modern Greece. When a critic mentions an author's youth twice in the first sentence, it could introduce a note of envy or condescension: in this case, admiration wins out over criticism. For the strengths of this novel shine through.
The descriptions, in the Pascal-Daphne love-story, of travel through the mine-strewn mountain-paths above Thessaloniki; of the execution of Daphne's brother by order his commanders; of the capture and interrogation of Pascal by the brutal regime, are superbly gripping. And in the modern era, too, the relationship between Véronique, with her bleached hair and heroine habit, and the student Theo, who is picking up the war-shattered remnants of an elder generation of his family, is edgy, vivid, and emotionally unpredictable enough to absorb the reader.
- Caroline Moore, Sunday Telegraph, 2001
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Hebrew Edition Cover |
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Reconaissance (Penguin NZ 1999)
Winner of 2000 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in South-East Asia and Pacific region
Short-listed for 1999 Montana Book Awards Deutz Medal for Best Book of Fiction.
Also printed in Hebrew.
'Kassabova, born in one of communism's stagnant provinces, and living in one of history's non-happening places, has placed herself in the most sought after zone in fiction - that rare realm between exile and memory…. Kassabova has assembled a beautiful novel from the ruins of history, from the smudged pages of a family album. She has done it with so much brio, rarely seen in first novelists. Exile, for a change, is not time in rust, but an exhilarating time in the Pacific.'
- S.Prasannarajan, Indian Express, New Delhi, 2000
'Reconnaissance is a singular achievement: powerful, honest, brutal, erotic and assured. In Nadejda, Kassabova gives us a central character who is irresistible.'
- Graeme Lay, North & South, 1999
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