Borrowed Land

Kassabova is writing about how we forgot the land and our animals and banished many tribes. In doing so, we lost our soul... A classic for our times

Monique Roffey on ANIMA

'The mark of a good book is that it changes you... I’ve rarely been so aware of an internal change being wrought, word by word, as I have these past days immersed in Kapka Kassabova’s alchemical prose. I fancy she had me under her spell from page one.'

Amy-Jane Beer on ELIXIR, Guardian

Culloden, in 1746, ended the old life of the Highlands. But Kassabova brilliantly shows, in this fierce, tender, plangent and compellingly readable book, that Culloden itself continues: that there are new and more sinister invaders, and that the clans must rally once more.

Charles Foster, author of THE EDGES OF THE WORLD

What I most treasure about this book is that it shows what love of place can do: how it moves people to action, how it creates possibility, how it is laced with sorrow. To be able to look at beauty and life in the eye while they’re under threat takes a particular kind of courage, and Kapka Kassabova has it in abundance

Roxani Krystalli

To read Borrowed Land by Kapka Kassabova is to understand what it means to slip one’s skin and become a river, a forest or a mountain. The sorrow of witness to ecocide in Borrowed Land transforms into a deep well of strength and so this mesmeric and intimate testimony becomes a defiant dreamlike thrum of resistance to corporate greed. A brilliant, daring and urgent account of the true costs of putting the profits of energy companies before the health of the land and those who dwell in it.

Sally Huband

A deeply moving, fierce and tender book about one of the most beautiful of Highland glens. Freighted with grief and a profound sense of injustice at the exploitation of this land, Borrowed Land shows us what really matters: the people, stories and wildlife of this unique place.

James Macdonald Lockhart

A devastating account of change in one part of the Scottish Highlands - the death of valleys and their people, the death of forests and rivers and how extraction and energy generation has ripped through this place. Such powerful writing, such anguish and love. Kapka Kassabova has written another brilliant book.

Philip Marsden

Essential and revelatory reading. It's full of quiet rage on behalf of the old land – and the health and dignity of the humans that live there – being destroyed by industrial capitalism. It's a wake-up call that exposes the great lie of a profit-driven corporate decarbonisation. Kapka's writing is ferocious and instinctive, and my copy is full of underlined passages and folded corners, so much is there to treasure.

Kerry Andrew