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Death and the Gardener
Brief Description
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...
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Death and the Gardener
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From the author of the Booker Prize-winning Time Shelter comes a new novel about departing fathers in a departing world
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Description
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 how to fail with heroic self-deprecation.
The garden he created out of a barren village yard first saved him, then killed him. It remains his living legacy: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees - and endless stories.
But without him, his son's past, with all its afternoons, began 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 in a fading world that spans from ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia, interweaving the botany of sorrow, the consolations of storytelling and the arrival of the first tulips of spring.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781399631037
Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 10 July 2025
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 135.0mm
Height: 216.0mm
Weight: 231g
Pages: 224
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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