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Borrowed Land
  • Published: 9 April 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529944686
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352
Categories:

Borrowed Land

A Highland Story

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Magisterial and unforgettable - an intimate story of a Scottish Highland glen, from the prizewinning author of BORDER

This is the intimate story of a Scottish glen and its inhabitants, of whom I am one.

From the powerful rivers that bring life and prosperity; to the Pictish cairns, undisturbed for centuries; to the meadows of bluebells, where deer emerge, God-like, in a flash, Kapka Kassabova reveals a world that has been abused, but remains achingly beautiful and alive.

In the Highlands, centuries-old connections between the land, nature and people have been, and continue to be, shaken by the forces of colonialism, industry, depopulation, and private property speculation. Borrowed Land tells the stories of those who are working against this disconnect: the last true Highlanders fighting to preserve their home.

An extraordinary portrait of the Scottish Highlands, this is an epic and urgent story of destruction and renewal, told through encounters with some of the last true Highlanders.
  • Published: 9 April 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529944686
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 352
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.

portrait photo of Kapka Kassabova

Also by Kapka Kassabova

Elixir
Anima: A Wild Pastoral
Anima
Street Without a Name
Villa Pacifica
See all

Praise for 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