The Physics Of Sorrow A Novel

A radical reimagining of the minotaur myth, from an essential voice in world literature. Winner of the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature • Finalist for the PEN Literary Award for Translation and the Strega Europeo Published a decade before his International Booker Prize–winning Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow has become an underground cult classic. Finding strange solace in the myth of the Minotaur, a man named Georgi reconstructs the story of his life like a labyrinth, meandering through the past to find the melancholy child at the center of it all. With profound wit and empathy, he catalogues curious instances of abandonment, spanning from antiquity to the Anthropocene; recounts scenes of a turbulent boyhood in 1970s Bulgaria, spent mostly in a basement; and charts a bizarre run-in with an eccentric flaneur named Gaustine. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, and exhibiting his signature audacious style, this expansive work affirms Gospodinov as “one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists” (Dave Eggers).

'Compulsively readable' New York Times 'Utterly original' Alberto Manguel In the small and the insignificant - that's where life hides, that's where it builds its nest. 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. TRANSLATED FROM THE BULGARIAN BY ANGELA RODEL

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023 A GUARDIAN AND FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'The most exquisite kind of literature... I've put it on a special shelf in my library that I reserve for books that demand to be revisited every now and then. ' OLGA TOKARCZUK, author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead 'Could not be more timely... It's funny and absurd, but it's also frightening, because even as Gospodinov plays with the idea as fiction, the reader begins to recognise something rather closer to home... A writer of great warmth as well as skill' GUARDIAN 'In equal measure playful and profound, Time Shelter renders the philosophical mesmerizing, and the everyday extraordinary. I loved it' CLAIRE MESSUD, author of The Woman Upstairs 'A genrebusting novel of ideas... Gospodinov's vision of tomorrow is the nightmare from which Europe knows it must awake. And accident, in combination with the book's own merits, may just have created a classic' THE TIMES 'Gospodinov is one of Europe's most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists, and this his most expansive, soulful and mind-bending book' DAVE EGGERS, author of The Circle 'Touching and intelligent' NEW YORK TIMES 'A powerful and brilliant novel: clear-sighted, foreboding, enigmatic' SANDRO VERONESI, author of The Hummingbird 'An immensely enjoyable book which achieves depth with an affable narrative voice' IRISH TIMES 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. As Gaustine's assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. 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 - a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter cements Georgi Gospodinov's reputation as one of the indispensable writers of our times, a major voice in international literature. Georgi Gospodinov is one of Europe's most acclaimed writers. Originally from Bulgaria, his novels have won his country's most prestigious literary prize twice and have been shortlisted for more than a dozen international prizes - including the 2015 PEN Literary Award for Translation, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, the Premio Strega Europeo, the Bruecke Berlin Preis, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Literaturpreis. He has won the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the 2019 Angelus Literature Central Europe Prize and the 2021 Premio Strega Europeo, among others.

Stories within stories, a few contemporary fables, a hint of the narrative complexity of Borges, a whiff of the gritty realism of pre- and post-communist life in Eastern Europe - these are the elements that come together in a unique and surprising way in the wildly imaginative and endlessly engaging short stories of Georgi Gospodinov. Whether a tongue-in-cheek crime/horror story or the Christmas story of a pig, a language game leading to an unexpected epiphany or an inward-looking tale built on the complexity of a puzzle box, the work in this collection offers a kaleidoscopic experience of a writer whose style has been described as anarchic, experimental (New Yorker) and compulsively readable (New York Times). Gospodinov's debut prose work Natural Novel was hailed as a go-for-broke postmodern construction - a devilish jam of jump-cut narration, pop culture riffs, wholesale quotation, and Chinese-box authorship (Village Voice). At once familiar and fantastic, his writing is high comedy, high seriousness, and of very high order.

Agnete Friis’s lyrical, evocative work of psychological suspense weaves together two periods in one man’s life to explore obsession, toxic masculinity, and the tricks we play on our own memory. Jacob, a middle-aged architect living in Copenhagen, is in the alcohol-soaked throes of a bitter divorce when he receives an unexpected call from his great-uncle Anton. In his nineties and still living with his brother on their rural Jutland farm—a place Jacob hasn’t visited since the summer of 1978—Anton remains haunted by a single question: What happened to Ellen? To find out, Jacob must return to the farm and confront what took place that summer—one defined by his teenage obsession with Ellen, a beautiful young hippie from the local commune, and the unsolved disappearance of a local girl. In revisiting old friends and rivals, Jacob discovers the tragedies that have haunted him for over forty years were not what they seemed.

Resembling the complex and fragmented way a fly's eye works, Natural Novel contains a myriad of storylines, reflections, and digressions, including a history of toilets and the graffiti found there, a meditation on the relationship between bees and language, and an attempt to write a book using only verbs.Incredibly funny at times, this novel is driven by the narrator's need to come to terms with his dissolving marriage and his wife's infidelity with their close friend. Gospodinov's first novel is both broad in scope and intensely personal, illustrating the impossibility of presenting life truthfully.

Winner of the 2014 Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy, from the author of Plain Kate. At the very edge of the world live the Shadowed People. And with them live the dead.There, in the village of Westmost, Otter is born to power. She is the proud daughter of Willow, the greatest binder of the dead in generations. It will be Otter's job someday to tie the knots of the ward, the only thing that keeps the living safe.Kestrel is training to be a ranger, one of the brave women who venture into the forest to gather whatever the Shadowed People can't live without and to fight off whatever dark threat might slip through the ward's defenses.And Cricket wants to be a storyteller -- already he shows the knack, the ear -- and already he knows dangerous secrets. But something is very wrong at the edge of the world. Willow's power seems to be turning inside out. The ward is in danger of falling. And lurking in the shadows, hungry, is a White Hand, the most dangerous of the dead, whose very touch means madness, and worse.Suspenseful, eerie, and beautifully imagined.

'Some smuggle cigarettes, others alcohol - or weapons. Our contraband, being invisible, is more dangerous. Our contraband is undetectable by scanners. What we carry as concealed excess baggage is stories.' In this exquisite literary gem, Georgi Gospodinov, winner of the International Booker Prize, invites the reader 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. TRANSLATED FROM THE BULGARIAN BY KRISTINA KOVACHEVA AND DAN GUNN