Death and the Gardener

My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.

A man sits by his father's bedside and reports radically and gently until a final winter morning.

His father was one of that generation of tragic smokers born right after the World War II in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes. A rebel without a cause, he knew how to fail with heroic self-deprecation.

The garden he created out of a barren village yard first saved him, then killed him It remains his living legacy: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees - and endless stories.

But without him, his son's past, with all its afternoons, began to quietly crack. Because the end of our fathers is the end of a world.

From the winner of the International Booker Prize, comes a novel about a father, a son, and an orphaned garden in a fading world that spans from ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia, interweaving the botany of sorrow, the consolations of storytelling and the arrival of the first tulips of spring.

Georgi Gospodinov is unique in many ways. I've been reading him since the beginning and I know that no one can combine an intriguing concept, wonderful imagination and perfect writing technique like he can -- OLGA TOKARCZUK, author of THE BOOKS OF JACOB and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Georgi Gospodinov is one of the most interesting and innovative writers of this century -- CAMILLA GRUDOVA, author of CHILDREN OF PARADISE
Gospodinov is a writer of great warmth as well as skill . . . He can draw out fully dimensional characters from the broken details of their fractured memories Guardian

Georgi Gospodinov was born in Yambol, Bulgaria, in 1968. His works have been translated into twenty-five languages and shortlisted for more than a dozen international prizes. He won the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the 2019 Angelus Literature Central Europe Prize and the 2021 Premio Strega Europe. His most recent novel, Time Shelter, won the 2023 International Booker Prize.

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