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

SPECIFICATIONS:

Author:Georges Mr. - Георги Господинов

Publisher:Orion

Language:English

Publication Date:2025

Number of pages:224 pst

Format:Hardcover

Width:138 mm / 5,4'

Height:222 mm / 8,7'

Weight:380 g

ISBN:9781399631020