Death and the Gardener

Georgi Gospodinov

Hardcover

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Reader Score

91%

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Good

Based on 9 reviews on

"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).

Book Details

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: Oct 7th, 2025
Pages: 224
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.60in - 1.00in - 0.80lb
EAN: 9781324097297
Categories: • Family Life - General• Literary• World Literature - Europe (General)

About the Author

Gospodinov, Georgi: - Georgi Gospodinov is one of Bulgaria's most prolific authors. He is the recipient of the International Booker Prize, the Premio Strega, and the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, among many other accolades. He lives in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Rodel, Angela: - Angela Rodel won the International Booker for translation and has received honors such as the PEN Translation Fund Grant and an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship. She lives in Sofia.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

The author, a naturally playful fabulist, is furloughed here into invention and free play. Around the remembered realities, he can weave the digressions, autofictional essays, and genial thought experiments that made such earlier works as 'The Physics of Sorrow' and 'Time Shelter' beautifully unconfining vessels. 'Death and the Gardener' doesn't read like a novel, but then neither do those earlier ones. They all read like Gospodinov novelties. . . 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. The joyful novelist got his joy from somewhere--he just happened to till it.--James Wood "The New Yorker"

An exquisitely tender novel about the last pain-ridden days of a proud, unworldly man and a middle-aged son's grief: a meditation on the meaning of fatherhood, and how childhood only really ends with the deaths of one's parents . . . Death and the Gardener is pleasurably absurdist yet elegiac.--Catherine Taylor, Observer [UK]

[Georgi Gospodinov] is a nostalgia artist. In the manner of Orhan Pamuk and Andreï Makine, his books are preoccupied with memory, its ambiguous pleasures and its wistful, melancholy attraction.--Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal, on Gospodinov's Time Shelter

A writer of great warmth as well as skill.--Patrick McGuinness "Guardian"

This is a difficult book to read at times, and in all likelihood most difficult for those to whom it speaks most directly, those who have experienced the same suffering. But they may also find a welcome recognition and empathy, and the beauty from truth that the best art delivers . . . to the select canon of worthwhile books about fathers, Gospodinov has created a vital and valuable addition.--John Self "Financial Times"

Raw and exposing, but with a gentle and affectionate feel--Gospodinov's deep and genuine love for his father clearly shining through throughout . . . a well-wrought, touching account, in every way.--M. A. Orthofer "Complete Review"

Gospodinov handles parental death with deft sensitivity, his memories brief and rounded....With his words, Gospodinov handles the subject with immense care - repotting difficult and delicate memories of his father onto the page.--Josephine Jay "Skinny"

This is Gospodinov at his finest. His playfulness is still there, but it is tempered by a deep vulnerability. What emerges is a sincere, deeply felt novel that creates room for the reader - not just to observe a death, but to reckon with their own memories of fathers, gardens and final days. Death and the Gardener is a work that transcends borders and genres, inviting readers into the silent space between words, where grief and beauty intertwine.--Nicole Vasilev "Readings"

One of the indispensable writers of our times, and a major voice in international literature.--International Booker Prize Jury, on Time Shelter

Throughout the pages of Death and the Gardener, Gospodinov performs a kind of literary necromancy: By writing the father in the present tense, he resurrects him. And like a gardener -- like the gardener that the father, too, will become toward the end of his life, delicately tending to his plants alongside his granddaughter -- he cultivates his subjects to bloom into life.--Rhian Sasseen "Washington Post"

Through the power and magic of fiction, Gospodinov transforms his individual mourning into a sensitive and moving work of art that is both devastating and comforting.--Amber Ruth Paulen "Asymptote"

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"

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.--Toby Lichtig "Wall Street Journal"