Death and the Gardener

The International Booker Prize-winning author of Time Shelter returns with another enthralling novel about memory, death and imagination, as a son keeps his dying father company, looking back on the years that shaped them.

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

A man sits by his father's bedside and watches him die. Watches as his past begins to crack, leaving him buried in all its afternoons. The quietly collapsing afternoons of childhood.

MEDIA REVIEWS

The simplicity and depth of this crystal clear prose fill me with great admiration.
Olga Tokarczuk

Moving, raw and elegant. A book that will grow in you for years to come.
Katherine May

Gospodinov gives a lucid account of his father's last days and his own lasting grief, enlivened with memories and anecdotes from decades past...A moving exploration of "the botany of sorrow".
David Damrosch

Tender, funny, unforgettable. A book so full of love for its place and people. One for all of us who've lost the elder who tended the land and stories we grew up on.
Tanya Shadrick

Georgi Gospodinov is one of the most interesting and innovative writers of this century.
Camilla Grudova

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.
Chris Power, London Review of Books

A wonderful elegy for his father, on par with the one Mallarmé dedicated to his son.
Mercedes Monmany, ABC Cultural, Spain

A profound and surprising reflection on the death of his father.
Andrés Seoane, La Lectura, Spain

One of the most beautiful books ever published about the death of a loved one.
Paula Corroto, El Confidencial, Spain

A lesson about death conveyed with the striking simplicity of the heart's guidance.
Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, 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.
Volker Weidermann, 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
Sandra Kegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany