MY RATING
Synopsis:
From the International Booker Prize–winning author of Time Shelter, a powerful novel on grief and the inevitable end of childhood.
“My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.”
Death and the Gardener traces the final month of a father’s life, a dying father in a dying world. His son Georgi, the narrator, reports both radically and gently from those end times.
Read more:
The novel unfolds also as a history of the father’s generation—born in Bulgaria at the end of World War II, “often absent, clinging to the snorkel of a cigarette, swimming in different waters and clouds.” What kept the old man down to earth was his garden, turning after his departure into a place of ultimate loss but also of consolation, where he would live on in the first tulips of spring. With striking acuity, Georgi Gospodinov explores the peculiar reality of taming grief through storytelling. Masterfully translated by Angela Rodel, this is another profoundly moving novel from “one of the indispensable writers of our times” (International Booker Prize Jury).
- Pages: 224
- Genre: Fiction, Bulgarian literature, Contemporary
- Publication date: First published in Bulgaria on August 27, 2024 by Janet-45, Translated edition published on October 7, 2025 by Liveright
- Format: Paperback, Kindle, Hardcover, Audiobook
- Source: Owned
PURCHASE LINKS:
AMAZON
BARNES & NOBLE
KOBO
THE REVIEW:
“We will never be loved as much as we were when we were children. This is why childhood is such a cruel time. Its cruelty is in what will come later.”
Even before I started this book, just by its title, I knew it would be a stellar read for me. I just felt it.
This is my first Gospodinov book, but surely won’t be the last.
Georgi Gospodinov is an award-winning Bulgarian author who has been recognised beyond our little and insignificant country, for which I can only be proud. He won the 2023 International Booker Prize for his novel Time Shelter. And for this one, he won the 2025 Helikon flower award here in our country.
Death and the Gardener is not just any book; it is a love letter to his late father. It is a raw, heartbreaking and heartwarming peek inside Gospodinov’s life. Every word dedicated to his father, the gardener, who is now a garden himself, has been ripped off his chest and has been laid down with such care and affection it hurts, but at the same time it heals you too.
This is not a novel, it is not a memoir, it is not fiction, it is more than that. Words can’t describe the feelings it evoked in me. It took me back to my childhood, with my grandparents in their village. The whole time I was reading it, I was picturing my grandad, my grandma, my childhood. Pain, sorrow, nostalgia, happiness of times gone by and long forgotten about, roots…
If you want a glimpse of what it was like growing up in a communist Eastern country and how this shaped us as people, our characters, our beliefs, if you need to process the death of a loved one, feel seen and understood, this is a great place to start.
Gospodinov writes about generations through his father’s story and his own story. I really can’t put it into words; it’s a life manual, a how-to deal with death manual, and a how-to-be-a-human manual.
Needless to say, 5 stars read if I could give it 1000 I would.
I cannot recommend this book enough.
Lin's Perspective 
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