In his memoir The Story Smuggler (2016), Georgi Gospodinov claims his first literary thought was prompted by a quotation on the wall of a local restaurant: ‘writers are surgeons of the human soul: their job is to cut from the soul all that is rotten and decayed’. The young Bulgarian had taken the task of literature to be ‘solace’ rather than invasive surgery. It seems Gospodinov, now middle-aged, has not changed his mind. In Death and the Gardener, his first novel since Time Shelter (2020), winner of the International Booker Prize, Gospodinov negotiates the border between precision and sentimentalism to tell the brutal but exemplary tale of his father’s death. 

It begins with a bad omen. Gospodinov Sr, a proud 79-year-old, has wet himself. The next day, the medical tests that brought him to Sofia confirm the family’s fears: he has advanced bone cancer; the prognosis is ‘worse than hopeless’. All anyone can do now, they’re told, is manage his pain – but even this proves impossible. Within days, he is entirely incontinent, confined to his bed and dependent on high doses of fentanyl. Within weeks, he’s dead.

Gospodinov’s attitude to this decline is largely practical, almost matter-of-fact. Amid opioid patches, noxious pills and bloodied bedsheets, ‘it is not possible to ponder the world with wisdom and grace’. Dealing with his father’s physical demands is more pressing. But there are moments of distraction, which arrive in the form