Showing results by author "Georgi Gospodinov" in All Categories

Our unnamed narrator is not well. He suffers from attacks of 'pathological empathy', which cause him to wander unbidden into other people's memories. He moves from recollection to recollection - from a Bulgarian country fair in 1925, where he meets a Minotaur, to inside the mind of a slug, as it is swallowed by his own Grandfather. Part family history, part coming-of-age story, part meditation on life in Communist Europe, The Physics of Sorrow is a dazzlingly inventive, mind-expanding novel from one of Europe's most important writers.

In Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a 'clinic for the past' that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a 'time shelter', hoping to escape from the horrors of our present.

In this exquisite literary gem, Georgi Gospodinov, winner of the International Booker Prize, invites the listener on a winding journey through his own memories. He shows us a childhood under Communism, a particularly Bulgarian variety of melancholy, the freedom and thrills found in reading and writing, and the coming of age of one extraordinary writer. Ultimately, this profound, playful and deeply moving autobiographical text offers resounding proof of the power and importance of storytelling.