Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story

Description

Kapka Kassabova first set foot in a tango studio ten years ago and, from that moment, she was hooked. With the beat of tango driving her on and the music filling her head, she's danced across the world, from Auckland to Edinburgh, from Berlin to Buenos Aires, putting in hours of practice for fleeting moments of dance-floor ecstasy, suffering blisters and heart-break along the way. Here, in sparkling, spring-heeled prose, Kapka takes us inside the esoteric world of tango to tell the story of the dance, from its Afro roots to its sequined stars and back. Twelve Minutes of Love is a timeless tale of exile and longing, death and desire, love and belonging.

Kapka Kassabova was born in Bulgaria in 1973 and now lives in Edinburgh. She is the author of two poetry collections, two travel guides, numerous travel essays, the novel Villa Pacifica (2011) and the acclaimed memoir Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (2008). She has written for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Vogue, and Granta.com. www.twelveminutesoflove.com

In prose as elegant and seductive as the tango itself, Kapka Kassabova leads us on a journey over time and across continents, above all a journey of the heart. - Aminatta Forna This is more than a book about dancing. It is about people, places, movement, love, trouble, a journey. I was gripped... Read it and dance. - Monique Roffey This mix of travel writing, personal experience and history is something that Kassabova has done before and she's frankly brilliant at it. [This] is sharp, clever and engaging, a wonderful mix of self-deprecating humour and genuine insight. - "Independent o"n Sunday A mesmeric memoir of love, lust and tango ... Kassabova relishes the painful blisters as much as the seductive bliss. - M"arie Claire" Travel writing is dead. Long live great travel writing. Part travelogue, part memoir, this is a sexy step through the myths around tango and its physical, emotional and psychological layers. You will want to learn. "GQ" Kapka Kassabova is consumed by her subject, and her book is all the better for it ... Warm, witty and deftly written, it's an unapologetically personal tale, but in it Kassabova reveals so much more about tango's allure and enigma than any more distanced study might. - **** "Time Out" [Kassabova] skilfully weaves her evolution as a dancer around the history and meaning of the dance as well as around her private dramas ... Her narrative, bubbly and brisk as it is, will entertain fellow dancers and fans of tango music and fellow wanderers pursuing similar ends. "TLS" This is a strangely moving book, Kassabova's sensibility running throughout the pages like a melancholy tango melody. The author is intelligent, sensitive and romantic, and colours the content with her own elegiac perspective. Nothing is under- or over-stated... Kassabova is expert at interspersing history with her personal life, the movement like the intricate dance steps of the tango. One seems to reinforce and shed light on the other she has a perfect sense of timing. But above all this book is... an entertaining hymn to her individual addiction: to tango and to romantic love. - "Scottish Review of Books" Kassabova wears her obvious intellect lightly and her writing style is akin to sitting across a wine glass from your most entertaining friend ... I reach the last page with a pang of sadness as I realise that, while I have sated my curiosity about tango, I'll miss this lively voice. "Herald" The depictions of place and character are sumptuous and intense, and overall Twelve Minutes of Love manages to be hilarious and moving, poignant and occasionally sublime. - "Big Issue" This is a very good book indeed... She never overburdens her narrative and yet gives us a clear account of the history of tango and her own, often tear-filled, emotional journey on and off the dance floor. Kassabova gets the drug-like quality of tango across, with ferocious vividness... I find myself liking [her] a lot. "Independent" In utterly fluid prose, Kassabova brings new heights of perception to the twists and twines of tango. A very, very fine book. - Mavis Cheek Kassabova's prose is steeped in the exquisite melancholy the Latin Americans call duende. - "Guardian""