STREET WITHOUT A NAME

Kapka Kassabova - Penguin Books - $28

US-based New Zealand writer Jolisa Gracewood is one of our most thoughtful book reviewers, she was shortlisted this year for the BPANZ Reviewer of the Year Award, (won by the way by another Listener reviewer, Charlotte Grimshaw), and in The NZ Listener dated July 26 she has a whole page review of this recent title by Kassabova.

I enjoyed her review and especially liked the final paragraph which reads as follows:

The writing, which bears the endearing trace of an accent, is lovely. Provocative and epigrammatic - "so it turns out the past isn't just another country. It is another country where someone like us, but not us, lives " - it's also improbably funny, despite the gloomy material. If prose could shrug, that's what this book would do. Upon finishing it, I just wanted to read it again, just wanted to marvel at how jauntily Kassabova sketches history's great tragic heft.

I am sure the beautiful, multi-talented, Scotland-based Kassabova will be chuffed.