FESTIVAL: After growing up in cold war Bulgaria, Kapka Kassabova returned to find things changed for better and for worse
By Theresa Munoz

Kapka Kassabova says she had the last childhood of the Cold War. "There aren't any accounts of growing up in the Eastern Bloc in those last 15 years," she claims. "But that's a story worth telling and worth remembering." Charming and petite, dressed in a green frock and pink trainers, she tells me her story in a café in Edinburgh's Broughton Street. Late morning sun brightens up our corner seat.

Street Without A Name: Childhood And Other Misadventures In Bulgaria is Kassabova's UK prose debut. It's also one of very few non-fiction books to emerge from Bulgaria, certainly outside the realm of academia, in recent times. Why does no-one write much about Bulgaria? Kassabova's laugh is light and capricious. "For the independent traveller, it's always been an obscure country. It's always been one of those countries associated with negative clichés."

Kassabova confirms some of these negative clichés in her book. Part memoir and part travelogue, the first half describes growing up in Sofia in the 1980s. Kassabova, her sister and her parents, both academics, lived in a two-room flat in a long concrete block. As the title suggests, their street had no name. Outside were fields of mud. "This was Youth 3," she writes. "And here I spent my youth."

But there's affection in these chapters. The family had their own balcony, fridge and bedroom curtains. Each block had a butcher, baker and bottle store. "So what if the butcher only had mixed mince and bloody legs that she wrapped up in coarse brown paper? Or the bottle store only sold lemonade and beer? It's not as if you lacked for anything. After all," she concludes, "you didn't know there was anything more to want."

Kassabova's consumer innocence didn't last long. In a chapter called East Meets West, her parents return from a business trip in Holland bearing exotic gifts. The family fixed up their flat with canvas blinds and a silver Phillips TV. The girls were given pink pencils and pens. And when Kassabova's father's Dutch colleagues arrived in a gleaming campervan for a Bulgarian holiday, she remembers her visitors "were like aliens. They were people from another universe. They looked different and wore different clothes. That's how divided we were."

For those in the Balkans, the Berlin Wall seemed like less of a place and more like "a state of mind". Though young, Kassabova internalised her suffering. "The Wall was already inside me," she writes, "in the bricks and mortar of my 11-year-old self." She became used to the feeling of being walled in. There was even a sense of security in that feeling. Living in Youth 3, she says, was like "living a nice big camp". But it was a place the Kassabovas desperately wished to flee.

And leave they did, but not without difficulty, and not right away. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Kassabova's father got a two-year university fellowship in Colchester. The family was forced to return to Sofia after their UK visas expired, but only for one last, miserable time. Kassabova fainted when her father announced that the family was moving to New Zealand. That country, she discovered, was at the bottom of the world. "I don't know where the hell I'm going, but I never want to come back," was her reaction. And with those words, the first half of Kassabova's book dissolves into unexpected silence, as if the family jumped off a cliff.

Why Kassabova does not include her experience as a migrant, is simple. "The focus of the book is Bulgaria and my return to it," she says in her gentle, mixed accent. It makes sense. Talking about her other life would counteract Kassabova's objectives in the book's second half, which are to discover how Bulgaria is coping 20 years after the Cold War, and to get in touch with her Bulgarian past. "All these years," she says, "I felt disconnected. If you leave home when you are young, there is a break between the life before and the life after. And you will always be broken until you connect those two paths."

And for years, she admits, she used to tell people she was a Kiwi. "People never believed me anyway," she shrugs. By denying her origins, she disassociated herself from a country people either thought negatively of, or knew nothing about.

So 16 years after leaving Bulgaria for good, Kassabova bridges her past and present. For six weeks, she travels around the country that is shaped like an animal hide, with the head facing Europe and the back end in the Black Sea. She searches for symbols of identity in a country that was added to the European Union just last year. She tours the Macedonian border, the Balkan Ranges, the Rodopean mountains. She stays in some rough hotels and speaks to locals, some of whom refuse to talk about the past.

In Sofia, she sees the city through a tourist's eyes. The golden statue of Sofia with a crown bearing the city's motto: "She grows, but never ages." She describes the air-conditioned shopping arcades, the American Bar And Grill, the Grand Hotel Sofia, the National Palace of Culture. She seems surprised at how the city is thriving.

Kassabova also visits old family and friends. We meet her generous auntie and uncle who drive their car in tandem; her old school friends, most of whom live abroad too and come back just to visit. Near the end of the book, Kassabova also returns to Youth 3, which has sprouted rows of trees, shopping malls, pizzerias and parks. And now their street has a name: Transfiguration Street, which seems fitting.

What Kassabova finds is more or less what she expected. Bulgaria is a wonderful place for tourists, but still a difficult place in which to live. "Let's simplify," Kassabova says thoughtfully. "It's a free place now. You can come and go. You can speak your mind. There is freedom now, in a social sense. But there is no protection. As a civil society, Bulgaria is not quite there yet. There is democracy. And democracy without civil society is the Wild West. Free enterprise thrives, but civil society is in its infancy. Is that better than before? I'm not sure."

Perhaps Bulgaria will never know what Kassabova really thinks. This autumn, she will be launching the Bulgarian version of her book. "I've re-touched some things, shall we say, for the Bulgarian version." Some parts have been omitted, and other bits have been added. It's a different market in Bulgaria, she explains. "This style of satirising your own life and your family is a very Anglo-Saxon device. In Bulgaria it's very unusual and is considered completely disrespectful and arrogant."

When asked how her family feels about the book, she laughs. "Generally, they have been very accepting. They have humoured me." And it is to her family that Kapka Kassabova has dedicated this finely written, emotionally rich book that reveals how connected we are to the land in which we are born.

Kapka Kassabova is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival at 11am on 13 August. Street Without A Name: Childhood And Other Misadventures In Bulgaria is published by Portobello Books at £15.99 COMPETITION To be in with a chance of winning one of five pairs of tickets to see Kapka Kassabova, simply answer this question: Which festival will host Kapka Kassabova?

Send your answer, along with your name, address and daytime telephone number, to marketing@sundayherald.com, putting KAPKA KASSABOVA in the subject line by noon on Tuesday, July 29. Usual Sunday Herald competition rules apply. Prize is non transferable and cannot be exchanged for cash. The editor's decision is final.

John Prescott ... and five other book festival heavyweights

SEAN CONNERY
Few would argue with Connery's billing as the most famous living Scot, so the launch on August 25 of Being A Scot, his long-awaited memoir, is a historic enough occasion in its own right. But how much will the book really reveal about the actor's life? Edinburgh-based publishers Canongate walked away from negotiations about publishing it because they couldn't agree an editorial format with Connery and his co-author, film-maker Murray Grigor. So instead of an autobiography it seems we're getting a memoir-cum-personal reflection. Fair enough, but will that tell us how good a kisser Ursula Andress was?

August 25, 11.30am

JANICE GALLOWAY
Another Scot, another memoir. This time, however, it's a literary rather than a cinematic star telling the story and the setting is Ayrshire in the 1950s and 1960s instead of Edinburgh in the 1930s and 1940s. This Is Not About Me is Galloway's peculiarly self-effacing title, though the book, published by Granta on September 15 but launched in Edinburgh this month, patently is about her. Raised by her mother in a tiny flat, she was a studious child who was drawn to music and silence. The power of this story will be in the telling, then. On August 16 Galloway will also be appearing in the company of John Burnside, Don Paterson and AL Kennedy when each of the four will read new work commissioned for Stavanger's City of Culture celebrations.

August 16, noon and August 23, 7pm

JOHN PRESCOTT
The Today Programme just isn't the same now the two Johns - Humphrys and Prescott - are denied the opportunity to spar. Still, Prezza's presence on stage at the Edinburgh International Book Festival should see a few punches thrown, though hopefully only of the verbal kind. The big news from his recently-published autobiography was that he has suffered from the eating disorder bulimia since the 1980s. Coming on top of the 2006 revelations of his affair with his diary secretary, Tracey Temple, and his long list of tabloid nicknames, his political achievements have tended to become obscured. Expect Blair, Brown and Iraq to dominate - and sit in the middle of the row if you plan to throw eggs. He's got a long reach and a tidy left jab. August 12, 1.30pm

ESTHER RANTZEN
Best known as the founder of children's charity ChildLine, Rantzen has now turned her attention to the other end of the life cycle: the Third Age. If Not Now, When? is a clarion call to her fellow baby boomers to get up out of their armchairs and get living again. Fundamentally, it's a broadside against ageism but with the number of over-60s in the population increasing, it's also a timely examination of a challenging new demographic. Rantzen will also join publisher Diana Athill and life coach Keren Smedley for a discussion of these themes in a separate evening event called Life In The Third Age.

August 20, 1.30pm and 7pm

ALEX JAMES
Musician, author, cheese-maker and space nut, Alex James comes to Edinburgh to plug Bit Of A Blur, his memoir of life in the Britpop band once fronted by Damon Albarn and in which James played bass. A legendary Soho soak throughout the Britpop era, the book's title is more than just wordplay: James was to the 1990s what Keith Richards was to the 1970s so it's debatable how much of it he can remember. Since swapping touring and debauchery for farming, he's calmed down enough to get a couple of newspaper columns under his belt and throw his weight and enthusiasm behind Britain's (so far lamentable) efforts to put a space probe on Mars. And yes, he does live in a very big house in the country.

August 9, 1.30pm

YIYUN LI LEE
Still with Granta, 36-year-old Chinese-American author Li was last year chosen as a Best Young American Novelist by the esteemed literary magazine. To make that list is a rare and potentially career-making honour and one she now shares with previous winners like Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen and David Guterson. Li was born in Beijing but has lived in the US since 1996 and that duality is reflected in her debut collection of short stories, A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers, winner of the PEN/Hemingway award and the Guardian First Book Award. Other stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Prospect. She comes to Edinburgh trailing the kind of superlatives other young authors would kill for.

August 11, 7pm