Death and the Gardener

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. 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.