Kassabova’s portrait of the once-nomadic shepherding life high in the Pirin Mountains of Bulgaria is powerful and moving: ‘I am the last hole on the flute’, she records one of the shepherds saying. Her writing is intense, sometimes elliptical, and threaded with flashes of gold. This book is outstanding not just for its sense of place but for its deep understanding of a very particular place, its history, peoples, traditions, ways of life and their obliteration by the geo-political tides of the C20th.