Death and the Gardener

From the author of the Booker Prize-winning Time Shelter comes a new novel about departing fathers in a departing world

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

About the Author

Georgi Gospodinov was born in Yambol, Bulgaria, in 1968. His works have been translated into thirty-five languages and shortlisted for more than a dozen international prizes. He won the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the 2019 Angelus Central European Literature Award and the 2021 Strega European Prize. His novel Time Shelter won?the 2023 International Booker Prize.