Borrowed Land

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

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

Combines the detail and intimacy of boots on the ground reportage with the universality of a dark fable. This is a Highland story, but also a global story - a poetic and haunting anatomy of what happens when a world is addicted to extraction.

James Crawford

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

Kassabova reveals both the tragic beauty of the Highlands and the greedy madness of the way the energy transition is unfolding in stark and moving prose. A hymn, a howl and a call to action all at once.

Ben Rawlence

No other writer’s political acuity matches her responsiveness to the natural world, whose despair at the human propensity for greed and corruption is matched by her insistence on the moral necessity for hope. “Nature writing” doesn’t do justice to her range.

Jonathan Coe, Guardian

This is a hugely important, and timely, book. It has filled me with anger and despair, as well as a good deal of hope

Angus Peter Campbell