Steeped in Melancholy

Former New Zealand-based author Kapka Kassabova’s latest “odyssey” Twelve Minutes of Love begins “in the enthusiastic, though limited, tango scene in Auckland” continuing across “three continents in search of the perfect dance (or ‘tangasm’).” “She comes close in places as diverse as Edinburgh, Berlin and the home of the dance, Buenos Aries,” Guardian reviewer Alfred Hickling writes, “before limping home to Auckland with little to show for it other than bigger blisters. But the prose is steeped in the exquisite melancholy the Latin Americans call duende; and the wider the search becomes, the smaller the global tango community feels.” Kassabova was born in Bulgaria. She now lives in Scotland.