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Death and the Gardener

Georgi Gospodinov

$45

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
14 October 2025
My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.

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

His father, one of a generation of tragic smokers born at the end of the Second World War in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes.

His father, who created and le

behind a garden, blooming from a barren village yard: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees - and endless stories.

His father, without whom the man's past begins to quietly crack, leaving him buried in all the a fternoons of childhood. 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. Set in a fading world, it 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.

Translated by Angela Rodel
By:  
Imprint:   Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 218mm,  Width: 140mm,  Spine: 26mm
Weight:   333g
ISBN:   9781399631020
ISBN 10:   1399631020
Pages:   224
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming

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.

Reviews for Death and the Gardener

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 * 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 Mallarmé dedicated to his son -- Mercedes Monmany * ABC Cultural, Spain * A profound and surprising reflection on the death of his father -- Andrés Seoane * La Lectura, Spain * 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 Menéndez Salmón * La Nueva España, 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 *


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