In Death and the Gardener, Georgi Gospodinov, winner of the International Booker Prize in 2023, delivers a profoundly moving meditation on grief, memory, and the end of childhood. The novel – part elegy, part autofiction, part philosophical treatise – traces the final month of the narrator’s father’s life. But it is far more than a personal account of loss: it’s a story about the fragility of memory, the peculiar rituals we adopt in the face of death, and the redemptive, if imperfect, power of storytelling.

The narrator is a man watching his father die – tenderly, yet helplessly witnessing his father’s decline. The act of witnessing becomes an act of writing, and writing a kind of survival. Death, as Gospodinov reminds us, is not to be conquered but perhaps quietly accepted, even dignified, through presence, through narrative.

Like Epicurus before him, Gospodinov asks us to look squarely at the inevitable. But where ancient philosophy often feels abstract or detached, Death and the Gardener is devastatingly intimate. The prose – translated with grace by Angela Rodel – is gentle and unhurried, meandering like thought itself. The book is filled with digressions: absurd anecdotes, lists, reflections on illness and ageing, even a moment where a doctor, after delivering a grim prognosis, awkwardly asks for an autograph. These fragments don’t distract; they mirror how we grieve – sidestepping, circling, pausing.

This is Gospodinov at his finest. His playfulness is still there, but it is tempered by a deep vulnerability. What emerges is a sincere, deeply felt novel that creates room for the reader – not just to observe a death, but to reckon with their own memories of fathers, gardens and final days. Death and the Gardener is a work that transcends borders and genres, inviting readers into the silent space between words, where grief and beauty intertwine.