Death and the Gardener

'Exquisitely tender' Observer 'Vital and valuable' Financial Times 'Crystal clear prose' Olga Tokarczuk Through long winter mornings in Bulgaria, a man sits by the bedside of his elderly father. His father, who created and left­ behind a garden, blooming from a barren village yard: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees. His father, without whom the man begins 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, interweaving the botany of sorrow, the consolations of storytelling and the arrival of the first tulips of spring. Translated by Angela Rodel

'Exquisitely tender' Observer 'Vital and valuable' Financial Times 'Crystal clear prose' Olga Tokarczuk Through long winter mornings in Bulgaria, a man sits by the bedside of his elderly father. His father, who created and left­ behind a garden, blooming from a barren village yard: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees. His father, without whom the man begins 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, interweaving the botany of sorrow, the consolations of storytelling and the arrival of the first tulips of spring. Translated by Angela Rodel

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.

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.