My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden. A man sits by his father''s bedside and watches him die. Watches as his past begins to crack, leaving him buried in all its afternoons. The quietly collapsing afternoons 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 and a son, about the last month of a man''s life, and the stories that make up a life.

Autorentext

Georgi Gospodinov was born in Yambol, Bulgaria, in 1968. His works have been translated into 35 languages and shortlisted for more than a dozen international prizes. He won the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the 2019 Angelus Literature Central Europe Prize and the 2021 Premio Strega Europe. His short stories have been translated into multiple languages, won the Zinklar Prize for Best Short Fiction, been nominated for the Angelus award for Central European Literature and longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Award. The story 'Blind Vashya' was adapted into an Oscar-nominated 2016 animated short film directed by Theodore Ushev. Gospodinov's novel Time Shelter, won the 2023 International Booker Prize.

Klappentext

'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