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Death and the Gardener
- Author
- Georgi Gospodinov
- Narrator
- Matt Addis
- Publisher
- Orion
- Publish Date
- 10 July 2025
- Run Time
- 5 hours 26 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
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.
Critics Review
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The simplicity and depth of this crystal clear prose fill me with great admiration
Olga Tokarczuk
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Moving, raw and elegant. A book that will grow in you for years to come
Katherine May
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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"
David Damrosch
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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
Tanya Shadrick
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Georgi Gospodinov is one of the most interesting and innovative writers of this century
Camilla Grudova
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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
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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
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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
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A tender, lyrical meditation on a father's death and a son's grief
New York Review of Books
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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
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An exquisitely tender novel . . . Death and the Gardener is pleasurably absurdist yet elegiac
Observer
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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
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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
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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
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To the select canon of worthwhile books about fathers, Gospodinov has created a vital and valuable addition
Financial Times
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Gospodinov's books stand somewhere between metafiction, autofiction, essay and thought experiment
London Review of Books
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A wonderful elegy for his father, on par with the one Mallarmé dedicated to his son
ABC Cultural, Spain
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A profound and surprising reflection on the death of his father
La Lectura, Spain
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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
TLS
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One of the most beautiful books ever published about the death of a loved one
El Confidencial, Spain
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A lesson about death conveyed with the striking simplicity of the heart's guidance
La Nueva España, Spain
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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
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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
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Georgi Gospodinov
- Narrator
- Matt Addis
- Duration
- 5 hours 26 minutes
- Release Date
- 10 July 2025
- ISBN
- 9781399631068
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Orion
- Genre
- Fiction: literary and general non-genre, Family life fiction / Stories about family, Narrative theme: death, grief, loss, Fiction in translation
Synopsis
My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden. 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.
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