Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story

To the uninitiated, tango is just a dance, albeit a dance with an exotic and sensuous allure. To the true tanguero, it is something akin to a religion, attracting the lost, the lonely, and the fanatical with its formal rituals, its sense of belonging, and its intense emotions. Kapka Kassabova first set foot in a tango studio ten years ago and, from that moment, she was hooked. With the beat of tango driving her on and the music filling her head, she’s danced across the world, from Auckland to Edinburgh, from Berlin to Buenos Aires, putting in hours of practice for fleeting moments of dance-floor ecstasy, suffering blisters and heart-break along the way. Here, in sparkling, spring-heeled prose, Kapka takes us inside the esoteric world of tango to tell the story of the dance, from its Afro roots to its sequined stars and back. Twelve Minutes of Love is a timeless tale of exile and longing, death and desire, love and belonging.