The sound of the footsteps – dragging and slow, like someone shuffling their heels across the floor – was driving him mad. Every time they came from above, he would change rooms: from the living room to the kitchen, then through the dreadfully creaky glazed door into the small…

Let me begin with a phrase so worn-out it almost dissolves on the tongue: We live in strange times. It’s not its repetition that makes it banal. It’s the fact that it couldn’t be otherwise. Even a line like “we live on planet Earth” at least allows us to imagine that things…

I was nine years old when I first realised that what I was speaking wasn’t simply the Bulgarian language, but something stranger, labelled by the incomprehensible word dialect. I was visiting my cousins in the romantic little town of Kavarna (“romantic” means nothing more here…

Beyond the ruined Park lies the Desert of Ghosts — a wasteland where the sun burns the ground white and the nights chill the bones.