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The Story Smuggler

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( 224 ratings, 39 reviews)
Brief Description
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... Read More
Format: Hardback
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Some smuggle cigarettes or alcohol, others weapons, but for the International Booker Prize-winning novelist Georgi Gospodinov, the most dangerous contraband is carried by writers, as they move stories across borders

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

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 Communism, a particularly Bulgarian variety of melancholy, the freedom and thrills found in reading and writing, and the coming of age of one extraordinary writer.

Ultimately, this profound, playful and deeply moving autobiographical text offers resounding proof of the power and importance of storytelling.

TRANSLATED FROM THE BULGARIAN BY KRISTINA KOVACHEVA AND DAN GUNN

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781399623117

Publisher: Orion Publishing Co

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 15 February 2024

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 16.0mm

Width: 136.0mm

Height: 204.0mm

Weight: 180g

Pages: 80

About the Author

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

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    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...
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  • The Man with Many Names
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    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...
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  • Time Shelter
    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...
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  • The Physics of Sorrow
    ‘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...
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  • 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...
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