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.
Translated by Angela Rodel