Death and the Gardener
A man sits by his father's bedside and reports radically and gently until a final winter morning.His father was one of that generation of tragic smokers born right after the World War II in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes. A rebel without a cause, he knew how to fail with heroic self-deprecation.The garden he created out of a barren village yard first saved him, then killed him It remains his living legacy: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees - and endless stories.But without him, his son's past, with all its afternoons, began 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 in a fading world that 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.
Georgi Gospodinov
Georgi Gospodinov is a Bulgarian poet, writer and playwright.
Gospodinov’s debut novel, Natural Novel (1999), is published in 23 languages including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Icelandic. The New Yorker described it as an “anarchic, experimental debut”. Gospodinov’s second novel, The Physics of Sorrow (2012), won several national awards for best fiction, among which the National Award for Best Novel of the Year.
His latest book Time Shelter was published in April 2020 amidst the quarantine and the peak of the pandemic, it topped the bestselling-books charts in Bulgaria. The novel won one of the biggest European awards - Strega European Prize (2021) and in 2023 Time Shelter, translated in English by Angela Rodel, won the International Booker Prize.
Sarah Franklin
Sarah Franklin grew up in rural Gloucestershire and has lived in Austria, Germany, the USA and Ireland. She lectures in publishing at Oxford Brookes University and has written for the Guardian, Psychologies magazine, The Pool, the Sunday Express and the Seattle Times. Sarah is the founder and host of Short Stories Aloud, and a judge for the Costa Short Story Award. She lives between Oxford and London with her family.
