To The Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace
KAPKA KASSABOVA
(GRANTA, 400 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064

It is hard for island dwellers to understand what it’s like to live in precisely the opposite situation: where land surrounds water, where borders are not the meeting of land and sea but a line drawn and redrawn on a map, where the last invasion was not in 1066 but in vivid, living memory. Kapka Kassabova’s great achievement in this book is to show precisely how that feels. She takes us along to her ancestral corner of the Balkans and – with her poet’s eye and ear, with acute compassion and self-knowledge – she illuminates the physical and psychological landscape of this traumatised region. It is a fascinating and gruelling journey. 

It is not clear to me why the book isn’t called “To The Lakes”, plural, since there are three of them (thank goodness for the maps at the beginning, you’d struggle without them). They are “embedded diamond-like in the mountain folds” at the meeting place of the Republic of North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, and to say that they lie at a civilisational crossroads, as the book jacket does, is a gargantuan understatement. The area is not war-torn but war-shredded, the past is not chequered but diced – hence “macédoine” for chopped-up, mixed vegetables or fruit.