THE SALT GAME

Colibri, 2021, 480 pages 

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The Salt Game is a psychological thriller with speculative elements, set in the abandoned coastal zone of Varosha, Cyprus — a city frozen since the 1974 conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.

A group of people with bipolar disorder is invited to join Tabula Rasa, a therapeutic live-action role-playing game (LARP) designed to channel their emotional extremes into visionary creativity. Divided into symbolic districts — Mania, Depression, and Hypomania — the players must not only build a new society, but compete for influence, identity, and control.

As inner tensions rise and the boundary between psyche and environment dissolves, hidden abilities awaken. The characters find themselves on the shifting terrain of their own subconscious — challenged to heal not only themselves, but each other and the broken world around them.

Nominated for Bulgaria’s national Peroto Award for Best Debut, The Salt Game explores bipolarity as both a diagnosis and a metaphor, weaving themes of trauma, transformation, and the search for meaning in a fractured world.

This is not exactly dystopia. It’s a possible future — brilliantly narrated, teetering on the edge of borderline states, often dissolving into a beautiful delirium… An extreme future we may still hope to inhabit.

 Lyuben Dilov Jr. | A writer, screenwriter, public intellectual, and editor of the novel

Elena Koleva introduces themes and techniques that are rare in Bulgarian literature. She uses the structure of a game as a narrative engine, while her characters and plot are multilayered — interwoven with symbols and references to psychology, religion, antiquity, quantum physics, and color theory. The motifs of salt and water are fused into a love story that unfolds through elements of adventure, thriller, and even crime — making the novel strikingly cinematic.

 Literaturen Vestnik |  Bulgaria’s leading literary journal

The language is rich and colorful — at times delicate, at others deliberately raw. It mirrors the mood swings of a bipolar psyche with precision. This dystopia has the power to consume you.

 Ivanichka Kyuchukova |  Editor-in-chief of Licata.bg and juror of Bulgaria’s Web Report journalism prizel

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