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Death and the Gardener

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Death and the Gardener

By: Georgi Gospodinov
Narrated by: Matt Addis
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About this listen

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.

©2025 Georgi Gospodinov (P)2025 Orion Publishing Group Limited Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic reviews

The simplicity and depth of this crystal clear prose fill me with great admiration
(Olga Tokarczuk)
Moving, raw and elegant. A book that will grow in you for years to come (Katherine May)
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)
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)
Georgi Gospodinov is one of the most interesting and innovative writers of this century (Camilla Grudova)
Gospodinov's books stand somewhere between metafiction, autofiction, essay and thought experiment (Chris Power)
A wonderful elegy for his father, on par with the one Mallarmé dedicated to his son (Mercedes Monmany)
A profound and surprising reflection on the death of his father (Andrés Seoane)
One of the most beautiful books ever published about the death of a loved one (Paula Corroto)
A lesson about death conveyed with the striking simplicity of the heart's guidance (Ricardo Menéndez Salmón)
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 (Volker Weidermann)
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 (Sandra Kegel)
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