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 a fternoons 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
