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  • Published: 30 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529933413
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

Anima

A Wild Pastoral




The spellbinding new book by the prizewinning writer Kapka Kassabova tells the story of her time with the last moving pastoralists in Europe: a gripping portrayal of human-animal interdependence, and a plea for a different way of living.

'A book that mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative non-fiction at its best' GUARDIAN

Over the course of one summer, Kapka Kassabova lives with perhaps the last true pastoralists in Europe.

She joins the epic seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs, to find pasture in the mountains. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this isolated existence, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled relationships at the heart of this small community.

Anima is a spellbinding portrayal of the human–animal interdependence in pastoral life, and a plea for a different way of living – one where we might all begin to heal our broken relationship with the natural world.

  • Published: 30 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529933413
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

About the author

Kapka Kassabova

Kapka Kassabova is a poet and prose writer and, most recently, the author of Elixir (2023), To the Lake (2020) and Border (2017). Border won a British Academy Prize, the Scottish Book of the Year, Stanford-Dolman Travel Book of the Year, the Highland Book Prize and the Prix Nicholas Bouvier. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The French edition of To the Lake won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (non-fiction). Kassabova grew up in Sofia, Bulgaria, and studied in New Zealand. Today she lives by a river in the Scottish Highlands. Anima is the final book in her Balkan quartet exploring the relationship between humans and their environment, following Border, To the Lake, and Elixir.

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