BOOK REVIEW : '' ELIXIR '' BY KAPKA KASSABOVA

The Scottish Highlands and the mountain valleys of Bulgaria are among the wildest places in Europe, measured by their variety of flora and fauna.

Both locales are dear to the heart of Kapka Kassabova - and as she roams the south eastern extremes of Europe, her mind keeps returning to Scotland.

Hers has been a life of seamlessly accomplished switching. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria's capital, in communist times, she changed languages after migrating to New Zealand as a teenager.

She moved to Edinburgh in 2005, later getting in a remote riverside spot, near Inverness, which surprised her with daily intimations of '' joy for no reason '', and connected her with the childhood summers she spent in the care of rural grandparents.

That goes some way to explain her ability to enter the pre-modern world of Bulgarian-valley-dwellers and write about it in subtle prose that mingles enough empathy with perspective.

Her previous books have explored parts of the Balkans convulsed by geopolitics but better understood, she argues, through the prisms of geography and geology.

Her new book adds another lens : botany. It is about Bulgarian people, places and plants on either side of a mighty river called Nestos by the ancient photographer Ptolemy, Mesta by the Bulgarian and Karasu [ '' black water ''] by the Turks.

One sketch after another introduces characters who, in various senses, have deep roots in that landscape.

Her Balkan heartland has experienced at least as much collective trauma, and far more recently, but its people and parts of their traditional way of life have endured.

For how much longer, Ms. Kassabova readers are left wondering.

The World Students Society thanks The Economist.