Georgi Gospodinov

My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden. A man sits by his father's bedside and reports radically and gently until a final winter morning. His father was one of that generation of tragic smokers born right after World War II in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes. A rebel without a cause, he knew...

Some smuggle cigarettes, others alcohol - or weapons. Our contraband, being invisible, is more dangerous. Our contraband is undetectable by scanners. What we carry as concealed excess baggage is stories. In this exquisite literary gem, Georgi Gospodinov, winner of the International Booker Prize, invites the reader on a winding journey through his own memories. He shows us a childhood under...

A man and a woman, who have only known each other for a few hours and must soon part, sit in an airport café and invent an entire shared life together. A girl born with two different eyes—one seeing only the past and the other only the future—strives for the unattainable now. Late at night a father conspiratorially hangs laundry...

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023 'The most exquisite kind of literature... I've put it on a special shelf in my library that I reserve for books that demand to be revisited every now and then.' OLGA TOKARCZUK, author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead 'Could not be more timely... A writer of great warmth...

‘Compulsively readable’ New York Times ‘Utterly original’ Alberto Manguel In the small and the insignificant - that's where life hides, that's where it builds its nest. Our unnamed narrator is not well. He suffers from attacks of 'pathological empathy', which cause him to wander unbidden into other people's memories. He moves from recollection to recollection - from a Bulgarian country...

'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...