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# Death and the Gardener
- URL: https://georgigospodinov.com/death-and-the-gardener/
- Published: 2025-10-09T20:36:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-02-13T17:01:53.000Z
- Description: novel, translated by Angela Rodel
- Author: Gergana Georgieva
- Tags: Books

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**

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