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 was born in Yambol, Bulgaria, in 1968. His works have been translated into 35 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 short stories have been translated into multiple languages, won the Zinklar Prize for Best Short Fiction, been nominated for the Angelus award for Central European Literature and longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Award. The story 'Blind Vashya' was adapted into an Oscar-nominated 2016 animated short film directed by Theodore Ushev. Gospodinov's novel Time Shelter, won the 2023 International Booker Prize.