A Short Border Handbook: Press reviews

'Sketched with a light hand and a heavy heart … Kapllani is at his best on the devastating effects of tyranny and its aftermath, where Albanians tear the statues down "like orphaned children robbing the corpse of a false and terrifying father". But he is at his most universally relevant when talking about the subtleties of the migrant's life … One of this book's pleasures is the author's honesty, but one of its shocks is that it exposes an everyman's struggle for dignity in a wealthy, multicultural EU. We think of walls and borders as something either in the past or in the Middle East. Kapllani brings borders closer to home and ruffles our notions of 21st-century Europe and the price some pay to live in it.’

Guardian

‘Kapllani treats the absurdities of nationalism in the Balkans – and everywhere – with mischief, wit and insight.'

Independent

‘Kapllani’s stories offer a poignant and humane glimpse into the complex life of a migrant.'

Financial Times

'An Albanian passport is no guarantee that the holder will be received with enthusiasm at border crossings. As a migrant he can expect to be given a hard time. In 1991 Kapllani walked to Greece, where he endured fear and loathing from the Greeks while working long hours at low-grade jobs for survival-level wages. Though his is a success story - Kapllani is now an eminent journalist and broadcaster in Greece - he identifies his chronic condition as “border syndrome”, a latent state that can become active at any time, so that he is acutely aware of his difference and remembers which side of the border he was born on. '

The Times

‘Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife's translation of A Short Border Handbook could not be timelier … combines the wittily mischievous eye for absurdity of George Mikes's How to be an Alien with the philosophical insight of Milan Kundera … With the best migrant literature, this book tells a collective story through a personal one.’

Maya Jaggi

‘It is a telling reminder of how the borders that many of us are lucky enough to regard as bureaucratic inconvenience often form unimpeachable barriers and of how the way they are policed can be ruthless and absurd.'

Irish Times

‘There will always be parts of the world that fall prey to tyrants, and there will always be people fleeing from them, seeking to escape their hell. I can see this handbook being of inestimable value to them, a guide to coping with bitter disappointment.’

Sunday Business Post

'Thought-provoking and blackly comic stuff on what it means to be an immigrant.'

Bookseller

‘His is the universal story about those with little opportunity but with plenty of guts - migrants, who, abandoning their meagre existences in their native country … his perspective articulates the fraught Albanian migrant experience, as well as the ever-present humour of this master storyteller.’

Athens News