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."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
"Gospodinov's books stand somewhere between metafiction, autofiction, essay and thought experiment" - London Review of Books
"A wonderful elegy for his father, on par with the one Mallarmé dedicated to his son" - ABC Cultural, Spain
"A profound and surprising reflection on the death of his father" - La Lectura, Spain
"One of the most beautiful books ever published about the death of a loved one" - El Confidencial, Spain
"A lesson about death conveyed with the striking simplicity of the heart's guidance" - La Nueva España, Spain
"Georgi Gospodinov, the magnificent Bulgarian writer, has long managed to write great stories contemplating the world from a micro-perspective . . . Now through a garden, which is a kind of biography of the father" - Zeit Online, Germany
"With his poetic verve and melancholic irony, Georgi Gospodinov is one of the most original voices in European literature . . . Death and the Gardener, is a memoir, confession and snapshot in one - and his most personal novel to date" - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany