To the Lake

“Borders and their intrinsic, deforming violence remain Kassabova’s subject. But in this book she goes further, tracing the intrusion of those cracks deeper into the souls and psyche of successive generations, herself included. . . . 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.”—The Guardian (UK)

“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 (UK) 

“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

“[Kassabova] refutes the lazy journalistic cliché of “ancient hatreds”. . . . [She] purports to carry you To the Lake, but penetrates much, much deeper into the seismic psyche of the Balkans.”—The Times (UK)

“Far from being heavy or depressing, [Kassabova’s] book is a delight, exquisitely written and brimming with compassion.”—The Sunday Times (UK) 

“Enlightening, surprising and elegiac . . . very much in vein of Sebald. It ducks and dives from topic to topic, finding strange connections and hidden stories . . . the book is interspersed with poetry and snippets of novels from the regions, and it is a joy to read a work where you actually learn something . . . a very elegantly written book. The actual descriptions of the lakes are written with a filigree grace, unostentatious, not overly ‘poetic’, and with a sharp eye for telling detail… I always like books that I leave feeling bigger on the inside, and Kassabova certainly achieves that.”—Scotland on Sunday (UK)

“Her narrative glides through different locations, time periods and perspectives so subtly that you don’t quite realize the full scope of its ambition until it’s over. In a lesser writer, this could come across as twee and irritating. It’s a testament to how good Kassabova is that it never does. You could open this book at any page and immediately get sucked into the beauty of her writing.”—openDemocracy (UK)

“What Kassabova attempts to bring out throughout this book: the quiet lives that get hidden by history. . . . She is too good a writer not to allow us many individual pleasures along the way.” —The Spectator (UK)