Border : A Journey to the Edge of Europe

Winner of the British Academy Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2018, the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year 2017, the Highland Book Prize 2017, and the Saltire Society Book of the Year 2017. Shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Bread and Roses Award, the Gordon Burn Prize, and the National Circle of Critics Award.

When Kapka Kassabova was a child, the borderzone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece was rumoured to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, so it swarmed with soldiers, spies and fugitives. On holidays close to the border on the Black Sea coast, she remembers playing on the beach, only miles from where an electrified fence bristled, its barbs pointing inwards toward the enemy: the holiday-makers, the potential escapees.

Today, this densely forested landscape is no longer heavily militarised, but it is scarred by its past. Kassabova sets out on a journey to meet the people of this triple border—Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, and the latest wave of refugees fleeing conflict further afield. She discovers a region that has been shaped by successive forces of history: by its own past migration crises, by communism, by two World Wars, by the Ottoman Empire, and—older still—by the ancient legacy of myths and legends.

In the company of border guards and treasure hunters, entrepreneurs and botanists, psychic healers and ritual fire-walkers, refugees and smugglers, Kassabova traces the physical and psychological borders that criss-cross its villages and mountains, and goes in search of the stories that will unlock its secrets. A sharply observed portrait of a little-known corner of Europe, and a fascinating meditation on the borderlines that exist between countries, between cultures, between people, and within each of us.