Death and the Gardener

Death and the Gardener

'Exquisitely tender' Observer
'Vital and valuable' Financial Times
'Crystal clear prose' Olga Tokarczuk

Through long winter mornings in Bulgaria, a man sits by the bedside of his elderly father.

His father, who created and left behind a garden, blooming from a barren village yard: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees. His father, without whom the man begins 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, interweaving the botany of sorrow, the consolations of storytelling and the arrival of the first tulips of spring.

Translated by Angela Rodel

Review:

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 *
All Gospodinov's work is time-bound and time-free, haunted by time and fleeing from it . . . This is inevitably a sad book in places, yet it is lit with remembered warmth, happiness, laughter, and a kind of lightness characteristic of its writer -- James Wood * New Yorker *
A beautiful testimony of a loving son towards his father, who is vividly depicted as a tall, good-humoured gardener, full of stories and exaggerations . . . With gentle wit, insight and love, Georgi Gospodinov has written a tender filial tribute with universal resonances * Irish Times *
A tender, lyrical meditation on a father's death and a son's grief -- Francine Prose * New York Review of Books *
Epigrammatic and intimate . . . A consolation rather than a provocation, and occasionally darkly funny . . . It might have you mulling your own pithy epitaph -- Alexandra Jacobs * New York Times Book Review *
An exquisitely tender novel . . . Death and the Gardener is pleasurably absurdist yet elegiac * Observer *
This light, slight, melancholic little book is concerned with the transformation of one thing into another: a father's life into the stories that can never replace him * TLS *
Gospodinov writes with a glorious lack of restraint, the prose taking on a poetic quality in places . . . Unruly, uncommon and quite magically alive * Literary Review *
Profoundly moving . . . more a celebration of life than a chronicle of sorrow . . . Like Seamus Heaney, Mr. Gospodinov digs with his pen. What sprouts up is a portrait of devotion, love and respect, of time passing and roles reversing * Wall Street Journal *
To the select canon of worthwhile books about fathers, Gospodinov has created a vital and valuable addition * Financial Times *
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 Mallarme dedicated to his son -- Mercedes Monmany * ABC Cultural, Spain *
A profound and surprising reflection on the death of his father -- Andres Seoane * La Lectura, Spain *
Elegies are the genre of our time. In Death and the Gardener, Georgi Gospodinov has written a powerfully moving elegy for his father that is, at the same time, an assertion of the writer's privilege to have the last word -- Alberto Manguel, 'Books of the Year' * TLS *
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 Menendez Salmon * La Nueva Espana, 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 *