wanderlust.co.uk March 2020 167THEBIGREAD DISCOVER
Book
of the
month
Best of the est
This month’s
bookshelf is
judging its
neighbour.To The Lake
Kapka Kassabova
Granta, £15Three Tigers, One Mountain
Michael Booth
JonathanCape,£15re
, we
ce
ourselves. It is the
hardest thing.
Kapka KassabovaThe old saying goes ‘we have more in common than which
divides us’. Well, some countries did not get that memo. This month
sees two travel titles exploring regions largely through the bitter
history that has torn neighbours asunder.
Kapka Kassabova’s follow up to her plaudit-
laden Border, To The Lake is another study of
people living on complicated boundaries. She
follows her family history back to lakes Ohrid
and Prespa, sitting on the crossroads of Albania,
Macedonia and Greece, where the people are
still counting the cost of the centuries of war.
With the beneit of being blood – “Whose are
you?” she’s often asked – Kassabova is able to
turn generations of vast political and social
upheaval into an intimate portrait of loss.
History and politics are at the heart of Three Tigers,
One Mountain, with Michael Booth cannily navigating
the endless enmity between China, Korea and Japan- with a side trip to Taiwan. As he pieces together an
investigation of national grievance, he’s ba led by
the reserves of resentment he encounters,
a self-defeating spoke in the wheels of progress.
What the books share is an understanding of
not just the complex history – and there’s a lot
of history here – of these grudges, but also
how they’ve gone on to become part of the
national character, with neighbours
deining themselves by who they are not.
So that old saying may be true then, but
unfortunately it’s just as often that what
divides us is also what we have in
common. Tom Hawker
Hidden Places
Sarah Baxter
White Lion Publishing, £15
What is a hidden place? It’s a question
we ask ourselves a lot, but it seems as
though travel journalist and longtime regular
Wanderlust contributor Sarah Baxter has the
answer. Taking us on a wild – and charmingly
illustrated – sojourn through 25 obscure
locations, Sarah exposes the places we never
knew we needed to be. Flip through the artful
pages to ind secret citadels only reached by
foot, the jungle-covered belly of the Mayan
underworld, underwater ruins in the Paciic and
phantoms in Germany’s Black Forest. It’s a book
to help you plan your next adventure – just don’t
spreadtheword.Gibbous Moon over Lagos
Pamela Watson
Hardie Grant, £15
Out of the villages and into the city
is the order of the day for author
Pamela Watson, who returns to Africa in
a follow-up to her memoir of cycling down the
continent’s rural backroads. Following her dream
to set up a social enterprise in Nigeria’s largest
city, she inds challenges at every corner, but
adventure, too – sunny getaways to the Badagry
Creek beach havens, thrilling rescues from the
loodplains of the Niger River and tense paper
chases with the Nigerian police. But despite
being tried and tested, her hope for the future still
waxesstronginthistributetoboomingLagos.The Frozen River: Seeking
Silence in the Himalaya
James Crowden
Harper Collins, £17
It’s not often that you get the chance
to remove yourself from the rest of the world
and live alongside a remote Himalayan
mountain community. But in 1976, army o icer
James Crowden left the military behind in order
to do just this, travelling to the wilderness of
the northern Himalaya to immerse himself in
the life of the Zangskari people. Butter traders
travelling down the frozen river Leh, villagers in
Padum and chanting Buddhist monks bring
this epic memoir to life, as James takes us back
to a time before mass-tourism existed. What he
inds is more than a land of snow and ice, but a
place where time stands still, made all the more
magical by its solitude. An inspiring look into
a world remarkably una ected by modern life.