Death and the Gardener

A NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR: "Lit with remembered warmth, happiness, laughter, and a kind of lightness characteristic of its writer." (James Wood, The New Yorker)

“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

From the International Booker Prize–winning author of Time Shelter comes a powerful novel about a father, a son, and the botany of grief.

“The simplicity and depth of this crystal-clear prose fill me with great admiration.” —Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.”

A man named Georgi sits patiently by his father’s bedside, until a final winter morning.

Navigating a season of grief, Georgi parses through the endless stories his father used to tell, and the history of his whole generation—boys born in Bulgaria at the end of the World War II, grown into men “often absent—clinging to the snorkel of a cigarette,” swimming in “other waters and clouds.” Out of a barren village yard, Georgi’s father created a special sanctuary: A lush garden where he would live on in the snowdrop sprouts and the first tulips of spring. But without him, Georgi’s past, with all its afternoons, begins to crack.

With striking acuity, Gospodinov explores the quiet rituals of mourning—how we tame sorrow through storytelling and guide a life through to its end. Spanning from ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia, the novel draws connections between myth and memory, place and emotion. Full of light and unflinching humor, and masterfully translated by Angela Rodel, Death and the Gardener is another profoundly moving work from “one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists” (Dave Eggers).