Borders and their intrinsic, deforming violence remain Kassabova’s subject. But in this book she goes further, tracing the intrusion of those cracks deeper into the souls and psyches of successive generations, herself included.

With a poet’s sensitivity, Kassabova meets with and tells the stories of the vividly varied cast of people who inhabit this fraught corner between North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, mining their conversations to explore the experience of 'identity as tyranny'.

The author is a consummate adventurer and indiscriminate observer, as drawn to abandoned monasteries as to fast-food chicken joints. Talking to strangers is her métier; in kiosks, at curbsides, and in cafés, she harvests myriad little sagas, which cast their own light (or shadow) over a land it seems no one can quite definitively call their own.

Experienced readers of Kapka Kassabova’s non-fiction know not to become too emotionally involved when she introduces you to a new character, in the same way as committed viewers of Casualty’s Christmas special have learnt to avoid doing so. In neither case do stories tend to end well. Indeed, if Kassabova were to filter out the dark from her writing, there would be little to discuss, except perhaps her great gift for describing nature. Nonetheless, you can’t help feeling as she persuades ordinary people to tell their extraordinary stories that she sets her radar to pick up anything that sounds remotely bleak or sinister.

Kassabova’s calling as a poet is evident in short turns of phrase dense with meaning, and in her propensity to feel the weight of all symbols, especially the supernatural ones. Sometimes the book moves slowly, like the lives of the characters who populate it, but ultimately it is worth it for the meditations on family, legacy, war and identity, delivered as short, sharp revelations. Equally important is the writer’s compassion. Her patience, language skills and her ties to the region enable her to avoid the paternalism, clichés and judgment that characterise the writings of so many of those who came before her.

This approach is more readable than it sounds: social history constructed from neighbourhood gossip, family lore, old wives’ tales. She makes intimate the grand abstractions of Balkan history.

Neatly adhering to rules of three, Kassabova’s well-researched and personal book contains three strands: vivid travelogue, ancestral memoir and historical analysis. Tracing the contours of the lakes by boat, foot and car, each of the lyrical chapters contains lucid stories of the shores’ inhabitants, whose tales of persecution and resistance resemble those of her own family.

To the Lake is not the usual tale of self-excavation. Over her last few books, Kassabova has developed an interesting methodology for her non-fiction. She enters a terrain and starts to absorb its character, collecting stories of its people along the way.

In lyrical, radiant prose, the author recounts her journey to the lakes in a quest to understand the historical forces that shaped her family and her sense of self and to seek 'continuity of being through continuity of place'.

Bulgarian-born poet Kassabova...explores the religious, political, and ethnic tangles of the Balkans in this potent and meditative travelogue steeped in family history.