Death and the Gardener

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).