Bulgaria lives with an ancient and persistent problem: its identity has been shaped less by an effort to understand what it is than by a stubborn flight from what it fears it might turn out to be. Since the late eighteenth century, the national imagination has developed as a…

Hello friends, I’m starting something here that feels a bit questionable – but then again, why not? During the night I was haunted by a flurry of vague dreams where old and new memories blurred together. So by morning, the only clear thing was that I wanted to write – and not…

He woke with the vivid sense that he had just spoken to her in French – and not informally, but using vous. The surprise struck a little later, as he gradually came to, realising that French wasn’t a language he could actually speak – not when awake, at any rate. He tried to…

In a house filled with broken toys and forgotten dreams, nine-year-old Anne — called Firecurl for the wild red hair she cannot tame — stumbles into a game far older, and far more dangerous, than it first appears. When a strange model landscape bewitches her and a storm of anger…