Growing Up in Bulgaria: A Memoir of Childhood and Adversity on the Streets

Ilaria Ghion: Libro usato in ottime condizioni. Qualche segno di utilizzo ma perfettamente leggibile. Bel libro per scoprire la Bulgaria e un'autrice poco conosciuta, soprattutto in Italia.

Italy on May 29, 2023

Joaquim N. S. Martins: O livro foi entregue no prazo indicado. Estou muito satisfeito.

Spain on Oct 05, 2022

Serena: This audible book was such a treat to listen to on my long walks around the neighborhood. I did not want it to end.

Kapka Kassabova was born in Bulgaria and dreamed of living in another country. Eventually, her family moved to New Zealand. In this book she talks about her childhood and then her return trips to Bulgaria years later carrying passports from both countries. Her writing is beautiful and I often marveled at her perfect word choices. I enjoyed the book so much that I bought a used copy so that I see the names of places she visited and read the paper version.

The narrator of this book, Emily Gray, was perfect. A lovely voice and no stumbles or mispronunciations. Actually, I wouldn't know if she mispronounced Bulgarian words because her reading was so smooth. I would listen to any book she narrates. Well, maybe I wouldn't now that I have checked to see what books she has narrated. I am sure she makes some of the books I would never read better than they were.

A very enjoyable book. I was hoping she would talk about her impressions of New Zealand when her family moved there and how their lives changed. Hopefully, that will be another book.

United States on Nov 02, 2021

Antoinette Kranning: With humor and emotional the author takes us on a journey back to her home in Bulgaria to find it different yet the same. I enjoyed the tour very much.

United States on Mar 06, 2021

Jim G: I'm have visited Bulgaria twice now and wanted to learn more about it, so I read this to help me get into the mind of a Bulgarian. I appreciate all the people, places, events thou rout, I looked many of them up, and that was a good way for me to learn. But the book felt dark and cold and sometimes the language seems overly stylized without adding to the picture. The book ends on the eve of BG joining the EU, so maybe it's a bit out of date. Still I appreciate learning of the authors childhood and I thin it will help me understand BG a little better. Lagged a little bit at the end but overall I enjoyed it and it was an easy read.

United States on Jun 01, 2019

Paul Richards: Kapka Kassabova has written a superb book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in good writing, Bulgaria, Eastern Europe, life under Communism, the rich history and mystifying mythology of that area of the world. It has an intimate quality about it that makes her personal reflections about her life, family and country poignant, totally captivating and universally appealing. Don't be fooled by the sad quality of the opening chapters on her childhood. The narrative builds as her tour of her country progress through her journey to all the places in her memory and through the geography and history of one of the oldest and most complex places in Europe. She returned from a 14 year exile and world travel to find her roots, or what is left of them, in her place of birth. Full of memorable stories, her story of meeting a woman survivor of the communist era concentration camps during one of her many train rides was most remarkable. The woman characterizes the camp as being like the ones that the Nazi's had. Then she qualifies that by saying that the Holocaust was really over-stated and that it never really happened. Why do you care about Jews, she asks Kapka. Are you a Jew? The...

United States on Aug 12, 2015

Julita Vassileva: This is the author's personal reflection of her life in Bulgaria under the last 2 decades of socialism and a trip to revisit places of personal importance for her 20 years later. While the account of life under socialism is very accurate, it has a darker hue, which may not be shared by other people who lived in those times there. Yet, it is a personal reflection, of a child growing up in the ugly panel block suburbs, in a young family who struggled to create a normal life and home, while managing two careers and two young daughters. Despite the darker hue of the pictures I find the account lovable with its honesty and sense of humour. The account of the journey 20 years later is also delightful and honest. A highly recommended book for anyone interested in Bulgaria.

United States on Feb 25, 2015

Lucy Irvine: A must-read for anyone interested in Bulgaria, Street Without A Name tracks the
emotional and physical journies experienced by the author as she revisits the land of her birth soon after its entry to the European Union.

Glimpses into her childhood and teens years under communist rule are written with
passion but never sentimentality against a backdrop of cuttingly outlined history. We see both the big picture and the small one: a forced exodus described by the government as a holiday at the time; detailed visits to loved grandparents repeated at intervals until death intervenes.

For me, the book has a particular fascination as some of the descriptions of how people lived 'back then', could almost have been written today. Communism ended in 1989; Bulgaria entered the EU in 2007 but in some respects, only the store front has changed.

Kapka Kassabova's Street Without A Name is a roller coaster of a read, a true tour de force and a history lesson all in one.

United Kingdom on Jun 07, 2013

Bill Templer: An extraordinary and often highly poetic and personal memoir of growing up in socialist Bulgaria (born 1973) in the 1970s and 80s, experiencing the wrenching post-socialist implosion and transformation after Nov. 1989, Kapka's emigration abroad in 1992, and a chronicle of striking vignettes crafted from her several returns to Bulgaria, and 'misadventures' on the winding road, from the late 1990s down to 2007 (Bulgaria's year of once hopeful entry into the EU).

In its first 35%, the book sketches a highly negative picture of living in council housing (Youth 3) in Sofia in the late 70s and 80s, and growing up under a socialism that was in Sofia often a "neighborhood under construction", a world of low-cost housing for working families like Kapka's own. Unfortunately, Kapka's entire recounting of her childhood and early teens projects a dark travesty of the social, economic and political realities in Bulgaria at the time, which she often captures through an ironic (even sardonic) prism. It is important to note that Kapka was just 16 when socialism imploded, and she grew up in a nuclear family itself quite alienated from socialist values, one of the first to emigrate after the...

United Kingdom on Mar 05, 2013

svetlayo: The book is wonderfully written, for which it got the four stars. It is a rather grim narrative of growing up in Bulgaria in the last years before the collapse of communism. A long-term émigré myself, I was a bit disappointed by the stereotypical characters and anti-utopian cityscapes (rough Gastarbeiters, semi-robotic bureaucrats and ugly cement high-rise apartments). The author states in the beginning that the story is highly personal and as such not reliable. This taken into account, I still find the book a bit one-dimensional. A good book in my view is like a well-balanced wine - just the right mix of acidity, tannins, sweetness and intoxication. The bitter, hateful and regretful tone of the book seems difficult to grasp as she never suffered persecution. What she endured is merely inconvenience on the grand scale of things.

United Kingdom on Jun 10, 2012