It would be more exact, though, to say that while Street without a Name is something of a return to her past, Kapka Kassabova’s novel does not signal her own return to Bulgaria. She comes, regularly, every summer, for weeks or a month or so, because of family and friends here, and because she prefers the clothing in Bulgarian shops – particularly the shoes – to what she finds in her current residence of Edinburgh... and that is enough. A longing for home satiated, time spent with those close since childhood providing fulfilment for yet another year, enough to return to another land, the place that has become home, one of many.

Kapka has been back in her native Sofia since August 23 this year, yes, to visit and to shop, but more so for the release of her book. The Bulgarian edition, published by Ciela and translated by Mariana Melnishka, was released on August 25. In the UK, it was published by Portobello on July 1 2008, and by Penguin NZ 2008.

She also participated in this year’s Apollonia Festival of Arts, taking place from August 30 to September 10 in Sozopol.

Local press has treated her novel – and her visit to Bulgaria – as something of a homecoming of the Bulgarian child made good. Is it strange?, I asked her during our interview at the Sofia cafe By the Way. She ordered a citronnade, and said that it was a surprise, that she had not expected all the interest in her book, and in herself.

“It’s quite special for me to have a book come out in Bulgarian,” she said. Truth, Street without a Name: Childhood and other Misadventures in Bulgaria is not her first publication – her books include the collection of poetry Geography for the Lost (Bloodaxe 2007/AUP) and the fictional Reconnaissance (Penguin NZ 1999), which won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in South-East Asia and Pacific Region; she has also contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, Landfall Magazine (New Zealand) and the BBC.

But – “this is my mother tongue,” she said, “though it could be kind of perverse that I wrote it in English, and someone else translated it back into Bulgarian,” though she has no qualms about such.

“It’s a turning point. This book is kind of an act of integration, personal and creative integration of a fragmented life. It seems to complete a journey for me – only one of the journeys, but an important one,” she told The Sofia Echo. “It’s kind of a story within a story. The book is a journey in time and space, and I also returned with this book in a way different from my previous returns. It’s not really an ending for me, but a beginning in my culture. Till now, I’ve been making in-roads in other cultures. It’s also about my breakthrough in Britain.”

In 1990, Kapka and her family emigrated to New Zealand; she lived there till 2004, during which she also spent a year in Marseilles, France, as an English teacher, and a year in Berlin on a writer’s grant. After living in England for a year, she moved to Scotland, which has been her home for the past three years.

“I’m in the right place,” she said.

The attitude there towards her country of birth is neutral to curious, at most. There is no discrimination towards Bulgaria – partly because there are so few Bulgarians in Edinburgh, she said, unlike in other places. “They’re aware of the slightly grubby aura that Bulgarian immigrants have in Europe, which is a product of a Cold War prejudice, and from the 1990s, when immigrants from Eastern Europe flooded [Western] Europe. They’re the ‘other’, but I think that that is changing now,” she said.

“I quite consciously say that I’m Bulgarian, because I want people to know that there are people like me, too, that not everyone is sweeping the streets, that there is a new type of Eastern European.”

Her English being learnt in New Zealand, she also said that her accent can throw people as to her origins.

And what is a person when her life has been lived in so many different countries? A sense of cultural identity becomes more of a sense of self, and a way of identifying with the world, than a feeling of pledging allegiance to any particular country’s flag.

With this comes living daily life in a language that is not one’s first. For Kapka, speaking a different language – be it Bulgarian, English or French – is yet a different aspect of the same person. She said that while the person is the same at the core, something happens when giving voice to a different tongue.

“There are subtle changes – in your humour, the pitch of your voice, your body language,” she said. “If I’m living my normal life in an English-speaking context, and I come across a Bulgarian, I feel slightly weird with the changeover at first. There’s a short period of acclimatisation.”

As to her decision to refer to Bulgarian place names in their English-language equivalents in Street without a Name (instead of Mladost, she grew up in the borough called Youth; her family’s flat is on Peach Street, not ulitsa Praskova), she said that she thought it would make more sense to the readers, and that she was glad that her editor at Portobello agreed. “Otherwise it’s just meaningless words,” she said.

Her book has been received abroad with success, with different reviewers calling it everything from “a sharply observed and devastating account of her return to post-communist Bulgaria”, to “evocative, disturbing and chock-a-block full of charm”, to a book of “elegant assurance” and “acid wit”.

Reader themselves – many of them Bulgarian immigrants – have sent Kapka e-mails, telling her that they couldn’t stop laughing and crying. “Everyone says that they cried,” she said. “Everyone says that they’re proud that there’s a book like this now.”

She thinks that there is not enough written about the communist past of Bulgaria, and insufficient variety. “When we’re dealing with the collective past, there needs to be a range of stories, so that society can reach a kind of catharsis,” she said.

And it is about her own finding of place. Moving to New Zealand was something of a “forced act”, because her family wanted to go somewhere, anywhere away from Bulgaria. “But since then, the places I’ve lived have been something of a search for my place. I’m very interested in different places and how they bring out different aspects of ourselves,” she said. “I’m also aware that this [searching] cannot continue indefinitely. It becomes tiring, it uses you up. I’m becoming tired of packing and unpacking my life.”

Street without a Name: Childhood and other Misadventures in Bulgaria can be found at amazon.co.uk; for more of Kapka’s works, including her poetry, visit kapka-kassabova.com.