Borrowed Land

Brave, intense, unexpected, lyrical and troubling -- Rory Stewart
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
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... This mesmeric and intimate testimony becomes a defiant dreamlike thrum of resistance to corporate greed...Brilliant, daring and urgent -- Sally Huband
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
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
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
I couldn't quite understand how something which chronicles such terrible destruction could be quite so uplifting. It is because Kassabova has hit on some fire at the centre of life. Love is attention, and here is the most beautiful portrayal and expression of love -- Horatio Clare
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
An important and deeply tragic account of yet another phase in the long history of the exploitation of the Highlands and the complete powerlessness of the actual inhabitants, this time in the name of renewable energy, a disturbing paradox -- Madeleine Bunting
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