Death and the Gardener
On sale
26th February 2026
Price: £10.99
‘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
‘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
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Reviews
A profound and surprising reflection on the death of his father
Moving, raw and elegant. A book that will grow in you for years to come
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
Gospodinov's books stand somewhere between metafiction, autofiction, essay and thought experiment
An exquisitely tender novel . . . Death and the Gardener is pleasurably absurdist yet elegiac
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
Gospodinov writes with a glorious lack of restraint, the prose taking on a poetic quality in places . . . Unruly, uncommon and quite magically alive
A lesson about death conveyed with the striking simplicity of the heart's guidance
The simplicity and depth of this crystal clear prose fill me with great admiration
A wonderful elegy for his father, on par with the one Mallarmé dedicated to his son
Georgi Gospodinov is one of the most interesting and innovative writers of this century
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
Gospodinov gives a lucid account of his father's last days and his own lasting grief, enlivened with memories and anecdotes from decades past . . . A moving exploration of "the botany of sorrow"
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
To the select canon of worthwhile books about fathers, Gospodinov has created a vital and valuable addition
Elegies are the genre of our time. In Death and the Gardener, Georgi Gospodinov has written a powerfully moving elegy for his father that is, at the same time, an assertion of the writer's privilege to have the last word
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
Tender, funny, unforgettable. A book so full of love for its place and people. One for all of us who've lost the elder who tended the land and stories we grew up on
A tender, lyrical meditation on a father's death and a son's grief
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
Epigrammatic and intimate . . . A consolation rather than a provocation, and occasionally darkly funny . . . It might have you mulling your own pithy epitaph
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
One of the most beautiful books ever published about the death of a loved one