truly remarkable... Searingly honest… This book carries its readers to a place where inhibitions and fears about loss and death give way to something more hopefully and, in their own way, real

Moving, challenging and hauntingly beautiful... This exquisite book chronicles the quest to process a grief that can never end. This is one I shall return to again and again

This is a beautiful book, a remarkable, cadenced recollection of how grief lives in the body. It is poetry as a kind of dance. You have to read it

Everything in Sleeping Letters tastes and smells of the authentic life. It’s a living example of what both religion and – especially in Jung’s wise hands – psychology are supposed to do and be. This tiny book is an enormous lesson in finding the sacred through our suffering, in always trusting the impossible, in remembering how to write and read while asleep

Humanity glitters under her gaze in all its facets. Her prose is spectacularly good and her storytelling is a joy.

A laudable attempt to record an endangered region and a disappearing way of life.

Exceptional.

This is a book to make you feel.

In her captivating latest, Kassabova transports us to the Mesta River in her native Bulgaria... Kassabova finds hope that this ancient knowledge still has the power to heal us.

Extraordinary... She allows her book to grow and swell, like a symphony, expanding and deepening its themes until the traditional wisdom and life of the mountain envelopes you entirely. Rather like a spell, in fact.

It soars with the luminous prose and unflinching honesty we have come to expect from this brilliantly gifted writer. Elixir is an extraordinary, profoundly moving book... Her prose is breathtaking, the stories heartbreaking.

A joyous celebration of the Pomak community in southern Bulgaria.