Borrowed Land, a Highland story is out 9 April 2026 (Jonathan Cape), Autumn 2026 in North America (North Point/ FSG), and early 2027 in France (Marchialy) and Bulgaria (ICU).
This is the story of a Scottish glen and its inhabitants, and of how I came to call it my glen. In the Highlands, centuries-old connections between the land, nature and people have been, and coninue 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 urgent and intimate portrait of the Scottish Highlands whose ancient land is being transformed by energy projects on a scale never seen before.
‘No other writer’s political acuity matches her responsiveness to the natural world, and whose despair at the human propensity for greed and corruption is matched by her insistence on the moral necessity for hope. “Nature writing” doesn’t do justice to her range.’ — Jonathan Coe
‘This is a hugely important and timely book. It has filled me with anger and despair, as well as a good deal of hope. The hope comes from the fact that Kassabova lives in and understands the Gàidhealtachd. A safe future for all of us depends on believing local voices, and not the sweet corporate voices promising delights but delivering destruction.’ — Angus Peter Campbell
‘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
‘Culloden, in 1746, ended the old life of the Highlands. But Kassabova brilliantly shows, in this tender, fierce, 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
‘As someone who feels a deep love for the Highlands, I found it essential and revelatory reading. It’s full of quiet rage on behalf of the old land – and the health and dignity of the humans that live there – being destroyed by industrial capitalism. It’s a wake-up call that exposes the great lie of a profit-driven corporate decarbonisation. Ferocious and instinctive.’ — Kerry Andrew
‘A deeply moving, fierce and tender book about one of the most beautiful of Highland glens. Freighted with grief and a profound sense of injustice at the exploitation of this land, Borrowed Land shows us what really matters: the people, stories and wildlife of this unique place.’ — James Macdonald Lockhart
‘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
‘A devastating account of change in the Scottish Highlands – the death of valleys and their people, the death of forests and rivers and how extraction and energy generation has ripped through this place. Such powerful writing, such anguish and love. Kapka Kassabova has written another brilliant book.’ — Philip Marsden
‘Brave, intense, unexpected, lyrical and troubling.’ — Rory Stewart
‘An important and deeply tragic account of yet another phase in the history of exploitation of the Scottish Highlands and their inhabitants, this time in the name of renewable energy, a disturbing paradox.’ — Madeleine Bunting
Kapka Kassabova 