Borrowed Land

A Highland Story

De: Kapka Kassabova

Brought to you by Penguin.

This is the intimate story of a Scottish glen and its inhabitants, of whom I am one.

From the powerful rivers that bring life and prosperity; to the Pictish cairns, undisturbed for centuries; to the meadows of bluebells, where deer emerge, God-like, in a flash, Kapka Kassabova reveals a world that has been abused, but remains achingly beautiful and alive.

In the Highlands, centuries-old connections between the land, nature and people have been, and continue to be, shaken by the forces of colonialism, industry, depopulation, and private property speculation. Borrowed Land tells the stories of those who are working against this disconnect: the last true Highlanders fighting to preserve their home.

An extraordinary portrait of the Scottish Highlands, this is an epic and urgent story of destruction and renewal, told through encounters with some of the last true Highlanders.

© Kapka Kassabova 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Reseñas de la Crítica

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, author of THE EDGES OF THE WORLD)

Kassabova is writing about how we forgot the land and our animals and banished many tribes. In doing so, we lost our soul... A classic for our times (Monique Roffey on ANIMA)

'The mark of a good book is that it changes you... I’ve rarely been so aware of an internal change being wrought, word by word, as I have these past days immersed in Kapka Kassabova’s alchemical prose. I fancy she had me under her spell from page one.' (Amy-Jane Beer on ELIXIR)

What I most treasure about this book is that it shows what love of place can do: how it moves people to action, how it creates possibility, how it is laced with sorrow. To be able to look at beauty and life in the eye while they’re under threat takes a particular kind of courage, and Kapka Kassabova has it in abundance (Roxani Krystalli)

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. The sorrow of witness to ecocide in Borrowed Land transforms into a deep well of strength and so this mesmeric and intimate testimony becomes a defiant dreamlike thrum of resistance to corporate greed. A brilliant, daring and urgent account of the true costs of putting the profits of energy companies before the health of the land and those who dwell in it. (Sally Huband)