Border

A Journey to the Edge of Europe

By: Kapka Kassabova

Narrated by: Corrie James

In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl 25 years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the "Red Riviera" on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime.

Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off.

©2017 Kapka Kassabova (P)2017 HighBridge, a Division of Recorded Books

Repetition

Repetition. Akin to Eat Pray Love without the eating or praying or loving. Yet another author selling her travel journal under the guise of self discovery. Listened to book on a ling drive and it almost put me to sleep at the wheel. At Bookclub, only 2 out of 8 finished it and we had listened to it.