Portobello will publish Kapka Kassabova's dazzling new memoir TANGO: TWELVE MINUTES OF LOVE in 2012, after Laura Barber acquired World English (excluding New Zealand) rights from Isobel Dixon of Blake Friedmann in Portobello's first deal of 2010.

TANGO: TWELVE MINUTES OF LOVE by poet and writer Kapka Kassabova, is a book about her decade-long love affair with the dance. Having hot-footed her way around dancehalls from Auckland to Edinburgh, via Buenos Aires and Berlin, Kapka uses her personal story to open up the hidden world of tango, with its aficionados and desperados, its endless practice and its fleeting passions.

Following on the heels of Kapka's highly acclaimed memoir about growing up in Communist Bulgaria, STREET WITHOUT A NAME (Portobello, 2008), this new project is the perfect pairing of subject and author and will confirm Kapka as one of the most entertaining, ambitious and nimble writers of her generation.

To read Portobello's press release please click here.

STREET WITHOUT A NAME was shortlisted for the European Book Award and the Authors' Club Dolman Best Travel Book Award 2009. It was also a Guardian Book of the Week, a New York Post Required Reading Book and one of the NZ Listener's 100 Best Books of 2008. It was published in the UK by Portobello in 2008 and was also sold to Skyhorse in the US, to Penguin in New Zealand and to Ciela in Bulgaria.

Penguin New Zealand will also be publishing Kapka Kassabova's latest novel VILLA PACIFICA in September 2010.

Praise for Kapka Kassabova and for STREET WITHOUT A NAME:

'A fascinating book - at once evocative, disturbing, and chock-a-block full of charm.'

-- Jan Morris

'If her finely pitched lyricism is the first thing that strikes you, the second is the richness of sympathy that lies behind it. She has already established a unique literary identity.'

-- Clive James

'Not many books on the travel shelves have the force of revelation, but this one does. Kapka Kassabova knows her native Bulgaria, the art of writing and the challenges of memory inside out, and she leads us into a country most of us have hardly read about with an elegant assurance, an acid wit and a heart-rending precision that can make you see the world quite differently. This book is a treasure.'       

-- Pico Iyer