So. You've written a memoir, but nobody has heard of you. In English, which is not your native tongue. And it's also a travelogue about your beloved homeland, Bulgaria. Where? Ah yes, the Wombles! Uncle Bulgaria...The Bulgarian umbrella murder. Wrestlers, or was it weightlifters? Men - and women - with moustaches. And you have a small following in New Zealand, you say. For your, er, poetry.

It is from this implausible position that Kapka Kassabova's bitterly funny, brilliantly clever journey through her childhood and her troubled country breaks down a Berlin Wall of indifference towards her compatriots. Observing that Bulgaria generally merits the shortest entry in any travel book, she resolves in her opening chapter “to write my own Bulgaria into being”.

Her communist childhood in the 1980s was marked by brilliant academic success (at 13, she could discourse in fluent French on the phosphate resources of the Balkans). But it also brimmed with loss, anger, an eating disorder and an odd autoimmune disease that struck in 1987, the year after the summer of Chernobyl, when “a festive radioactive rain” fell on her May Day parade. This undiagnosed illness left her behind the window bars of Sofia's Second Regional children's hospital for rheumatic diseases. She survived only because her parents spirited her out, persuading a retired professor of immunology to treat her secretly and illegally at home.

With the fall of the Wall in 1989, the family decamped to New Zealand. Fourteen years later, Kassabova returns to Bulgaria on the first of several visits, charting the shift away from the brutalities of totalitarianism towards those of capitalist opportunism. She takes us on a bumpy road. After a bus journey through the Shipka pass, she writes: “It's a glorious ride, but I'm too worried about our driver to enjoy it. Facial hair creeps up to his eyes from all sides, and a poster of a naked silicone diva covers most of his front windscreen. His eyes are in direct contact with the diva's pubic hair. I hope he's made small holes in her genital region to see through, otherwise we're in trouble.”

Yet nothing escapes Kassabova's own resolute gaze. Not the Serb and Macedonian gangsters who have moved into her family's building in Sofia and shot four people, including a baby. And not the fate of Vera (a young girl in her aunt's village), who has somehow survived being sold for 1,000 euros into prostitution in Germany, but who seems so trusting we can only conclude it will happen again. She is particularly sharp on the us-and-them dualities of her childhood. “Us” is families such as hers in a two-room flat in on an unnamed street in a concrete development called Youth 3, on the edge of Sofia. “Them” is the privileged communist elite living in the city itself. The peasants and gypsies forced off the land and into identikit homes are yet another “them”, as are the ethnic Turks compelled by the regime to flee the country or change their names to disguise their ancestry. Kassabova explains the history, but who can really get to grips with the complexities of a nation that in the 1940s declared war on Germany while simultaneously remaining at war with the allies? “Not bad for a country with everything to lose,” she comments.

Kassabova filters her story through the narrative of family drama. It is in the early chapters, where she spiritedly evokes the minutiae of ordinary life on the wrong side of the iron curtain, in the wrong housing, that the emotional consequences of growing up in Bulgaria's regime of “Socialism with a Human Face” hit home. You can smell it all, the cooking smells seeping through the thin, damp walls, the endless mud, the revolting lavatories.

Kassabova's parents, both engineers, were allowed occasional work trips abroad, but their freedom had a personal cost. Even as a child, camping in the Bulgarian mountains with her father visiting Dutch colleagues, Kassabova knew they were not meeting western families as equals: “They were going back to where we couldn't follow. They had packed up the world and taken it with them. They had given us a chocolate biscuit from that tin, and then put the lid on.”

The raw memoir is the first great achievement of this multifaceted book. The second is her meditation on nationality. Today we all live with the consequences of the tumbling of economic, political and cultural walls. In a globalised world, Kassabova suggests, we are all Bulgarians now.

Street Without a Name by Kapka Kassabova
Portobello £15.99 pp352 Buy the book from Books First £14.39 including free delivery

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