Death and the Gardener

Gospodinov, whose novel Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize, offers a beautiful meditation on identity and mortality. The unnamed narrator, a prize-winning Bulgarian author, wonders about his fate, now that his father has died and his mother is in poor health: “Do we still exist if the last person who remembers us as children has passed away?” He recounts the stages of his father’s illness, from a diagnosis of terminal cancer 17 years earlier, which seemed to be miraculously cured, to the cancer’s recent and fatal return. He draws lyrical insights from his father’s devotion to his garden (“My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden”) and describes the helplessness and sorrow of watching his father’s decline. The descriptions are wrenching, but they’re leavened with moments of humor, such as when the narrator remembers the “first aid kit of tales” that his father, an excellent raconteur, drew on to provide much-needed laughter. This will stay with readers. Agent: Kristi Murray, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)