Death And The Gardener

By Georgi Gospondinov

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 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.

Orion, 2025