'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 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, interweaving the botany of sorrow, the consolations of storytelling and the arrival of the first tulips of spring.

Translated by Angela Rodel

"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

"All Gospodinov's work is time-bound and time-free, haunted by time and fleeing from it . . . This is inevitably a sad book in places, yet it is lit with remembered warmth, happiness, laughter, and a kind of lightness characteristic of its writer" - New Yorker

"A beautiful testimony of a loving son towards his father, who is vividly depicted as a tall, good-humoured gardener, full of stories and exaggerations . . . With gentle wit, insight and love, Georgi Gospodinov has written a tender filial tribute with universal resonances" - Irish Times

"Epigrammatic and intimate . . . A consolation rather than a provocation, and occasionally darkly funny . . . It might have you mulling your own pithy epitaph" - New York Times Book Review

"An exquisitely tender novel . . . Death and the Gardener is pleasurably absurdist yet elegiac" - Observer

"This light, slight, melancholic little book is concerned with the transformation of one thing into another: a father's life into the stories that can never replace him " - TLS

"Gospodinov writes with a glorious lack of restraint, the prose taking on a poetic quality in places . . . Unruly, uncommon and quite magically alive " - Literary Review

"Profoundly moving . . . more a celebration of life than a chronicle of sorrow . . . Like Seamus Heaney, Mr. Gospodinov digs with his pen. What sprouts up is a portrait of devotion, love and respect, of time passing and roles reversing" - Wall Street Journal

"To the select canon of worthwhile books about fathers, Gospodinov has created a vital and valuable addition" - Financial Times

"Gospodinov's books stand somewhere between metafiction, autofiction, essay and thought experiment" - London Review of Books

"A wonderful elegy for his father, on par with the one Mallarmé dedicated to his son" - ABC Cultural, Spain

"A profound and surprising reflection on the death of his father" - La Lectura, Spain

"One of the most beautiful books ever published about the death of a loved one" - El Confidencial, Spain

"A lesson about death conveyed with the striking simplicity of the heart's guidance" - 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" - 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" - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany