I have the impression that fewer novels are written about fathers and fatherhood than mothers and motherhood. That may simply reflect my reading choices and experience. Anyone who loved their father and lost him to illness is likely to be moved deeply by Death and the Gardener, the most recent novel from the Bulgarian writer (and winner of the International Booker prize in 2023), Georgi Gospodinov.

The book reads like a memoir. The narrator is a celebrated Bulgarian writer and his story is told with the apparently unflinching candor that one normally associates with journals or autobiographies. His account weaves memories of his father with a description of the old man’s illness, treatment, and death, all told in a style marked by simple directness with flashes of real tenderness. It’s one of those books that you find yourself wanting to read more slowly, more carefully, going back over particular sentences and paragraphs to embed them firmly in your memory and experience.

In remembering his father, and telling those remembrances, the narrator creates a eulogy and a memorial that will outlast the father and the son. And Gospodinov, in creating the story, creates a eulogy and memorial for every father that was loved and lost, so that perhaps the sons still living might realize and cherish what they had and what will never return. “We will never be as safe as we once were in our father’s arms“.