Borders and their intrinsic, deforming violence remain Kassabova’s subject. But in this book she goes further, tracing the intrusion of those cracks deeper into the souls and psyches of successive generations, herself included ... Kassabova has never been interested in derring‑do; the perils she encounters are of the psychic variety, and they are genuine ... To the Lake’s objective is not healing so much as reconciliation, a quest for spiritual wholeness ... The narrative performs another kind of reconciliation, too. A characteristic of modern travel writing is a patchwork, broken-mirror approach to form: short, lapidary encounters; the micro-patterning of images and tales and meditations – a tendency attributable to modernism as much as to the impressionistic, stop-start nature of any journey. It was partly the compound facets of Border that accounted for its miraculous glimmer. To the Lake is more languid and more patient, as fluid and inexorable as the underground watercourses that connect the two lakes. The book’s achievement, likewise, is to reconcile, thrillingly, what those twin bodies of water represent to Kassabova: the unconscious and the conscious; the darkness of history and the radiance of life and love.

With a poet’s sensitivity, Kassabova meets with and tells the stories of the vividly varied cast of people who inhabit this fraught corner between North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, mining their conversations to explore the experience of 'identity as tyranny' ... The compelling blend of memoir, history and travelogue into which these ideas are turned is a poignant, powerful argument to overcome our obsession with difference. The book’s architecture seamlessly weaves its multiple perspectives, gathered from distant family members, monks, fishermen, widows, outsiders and survivors ... Together, they form a haunting and elegant whole with a vehement message at its core: 'Lake and mountain were one. The world, when left alone, was one.'

The author is a consummate adventurer and indiscriminate observer, as drawn to abandoned monasteries as to fast-food chicken joints. Talking to strangers is her métier; in kiosks, at curbsides, and in cafés, she harvests myriad little sagas, which cast their own light (or shadow) over a land it seems no one can quite definitively call their own ... The sweeping statements and capital-Q questions are par for the course, but where Kassabova’s book shines is in the casual precision of the author’s own observations. Her style is wily and imaginative, with sentences rapidly gliding into the unexpected ... Her witnesses are delightfully unreliable ... You learn to shrug and just be grateful you’re not the one who has to figure out how to get home for the evening. One starts to weary, however, when our adventurer’s gaze turns inward. If readers of Border felt the author to be as elusive as her subject matter, perhaps there was some relief in the quicksilver reportage; in To the Lake, introspection comes less artfully ('To be female is to grieve').

Experienced readers of Kapka Kassabova’s non-fiction know not to become too emotionally involved when she introduces you to a new character, in the same way as committed viewers of Casualty’s Christmas special have learnt to avoid doing so. In neither case do stories tend to end well. Indeed, if Kassabova were to filter out the dark from her writing, there would be little to discuss, except perhaps her great gift for describing nature. Nonetheless, you can’t help feeling as she persuades ordinary people to tell their extraordinary stories that she sets her radar to pick up anything that sounds remotely bleak or sinister ... All Kassabova’s non-fiction is intensely personal, but her new book particularly so ... As in all her stories, Kassabova strikes the perfect balance in exposing how the wheel of history, especially unforgiving in the Balkans, crushes great human potential but is not always able to extinguish it.

Kassabova’s calling as a poet is evident in short turns of phrase dense with meaning, and in her propensity to feel the weight of all symbols, especially the supernatural ones. Sometimes the book moves slowly, like the lives of the characters who populate it, but ultimately it is worth it for the meditations on family, legacy, war and identity, delivered as short, sharp revelations. Equally important is the writer’s compassion. Her patience, language skills and her ties to the region enable her to avoid the paternalism, clichés and judgment that characterise the writings of so many of those who came before her ... To the Lake is an exquisitely written rallying cry to embrace the notion that the people of the Balkans — and indeed humanity as a whole — have more in common than what divides them, despite generations of strife suggesting otherwise.

This approach is more readable than it sounds: social history constructed from neighbourhood gossip, family lore, old wives’ tales. She makes intimate the grand abstractions of Balkan history ... But it’s her grandmother, who emigrated to Bulgaria from Ohrid in Macedonia, who is the book’s animating spirit, summoning Kassabova back to the lake. She returns almost as a pilgrim and this serene lakeside town becomes a kind of reliquary containing cherished family memories ... Kassabova purports to carry you To The Lake, but penetrates much, much deeper into the seismic psyche of the Balkans.

Neatly adhering to rules of three, Kassabova’s well-researched and personal book contains three strands: vivid travelogue, ancestral memoir and historical analysis. Tracing the contours of the lakes by boat, foot and car, each of the lyrical chapters contains lucid stories of the shores’ inhabitants, whose tales of persecution and resistance resemble those of her own family ... peopled by memorable characters, brought alive in ethnographic detail ... She presents the region as containing multitudes of human experience, stories of great suffering and defiance, cruelty and comedy. If disbelief remains, it’s a result of too much reality, not fantasy ... For a region enmeshed in recent conflict, the symbolic forgiveness of the lake is poignant. Kassabova tells us that agon (violent contest) inevitably leads to agonia (agony). But all is swallowed by the lake, and its merciful embrace.

To the Lake is not the usual tale of self-excavation. Over her last few books, Kassabova has developed an interesting methodology for her non-fiction. She enters a terrain and starts to absorb its character, collecting stories of its people along the way ... In To the Lake, she repeats this feat, with fascinating results. She finds an explanation for her internal strife, one that is reliant on knowledge of the lake folk. In a sense, she re-maps the region, unveiling the polyphonic history of its people, from Illyrian tribes to modern day Sufis .... Anyone who is seeking to truly understand Balkan culture, in all its pain and glory, should know about the lakes, and read this book.

In lyrical, radiant prose, the author recounts her journey to the lakes in a quest to understand the historical forces that shaped her family and her sense of self and to seek 'continuity of being through continuity of place' ... Through the many people she met—many, in fact, relatives—Kassabova chronicles the region’s history and culture, evoking songs, folk tales, poetry, myths, and superstitions ... A haunting, captivating memoir of homecoming.

Bulgarian-born poet Kassabova...explores the religious, political, and ethnic tangles of the Balkans in this potent and meditative travelogue steeped in family history ... Despite the grim history of regional strife, Kassabova’s faith in the power of forgiveness leads her to draw hopeful conclusions about the past and the future of the Balkans. This heartfelt exploration of the intersections between geography, history, and identity mesmerizes