Death and the Gardener

My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden. Through long winter mornings, a man sits by the bedside of his elderly father. His father, one of a generation of tragic smokers born at the end of the Second World War in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes. His father, who created and le behind a garden, blooming from a barren village yard: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees - and endless stories. His father, without whom the man's past begins to quietly crack, leaving him buried in all the afternoons of childhood. 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. Set in a fading world, it 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. Translated by Angela Rodel