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From the International Booker Prize–winning author of Time Shelter, a powerful novel on grief and the inevitable end of childhood.
"My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden."
Death and the Gardener traces the final month of a father's life, a dying father in a dying world. His son Georgi, the narrator, reports both radically and gently from those end times. The novel unfolds also as a history of the father's generation―born in Bulgaria at the end of World War II, "often absent, clinging to the snorkel of a cigarette, swimming in different waters and clouds." What kept the old man down to earth was his garden, turning after his departure into a place of ultimate loss but also of consolation, where he would live on in the first tulips of spring. With striking acuity, Georgi Gospodinov explores the peculiar reality of taming grief through storytelling. Masterfully translated by Angela Rodel, this is another profoundly moving novel from "one of the indispensable writers of our times" (International Booker Prize Jury).
"A writer of great warmth as well as skill." —The Guardian (UK)
"This is a difficult book to read at times, and in all likelihood most difficult for those to whom it speaks most directly, those who have experienced the same suffering. But they may also find a welcome recognition and empathy, and the beauty from truth that the best art delivers...to the select canon of worthwhile books about fathers, Gospodinov has created a vital and valuable addition." —Financial Times (UK)
"An exquisitely tender novel about the last pain-ridden days of a proud, unworldly man and a middle-aged son's grief: a meditation on the meaning of fatherhood, and how childhood only really ends with the deaths of one's parents ... Death and the Gardener is pleasurably absurdist yet elegiac." —The Observer (UK)
This information about Death and the Gardener was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Georgi Gospodinov is one of Bulgaria's most prolific authors. He is the recipient of the International Booker Prize, the Premio Strega, and the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, among many other accolades. He lives in Sofia, Bulgaria.
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