PRAISE FOR GEORGI GOSPODINOV

‘A writer of great warmth as well as skill’

Guardian

‘Georgi Gospodinov is unique in many ways. I’ve been reading him since the beginning and I know that no one can combine an intriguing concept, wonderful imagination and perfect writing technique like he can’

Olga Tokarczuk, author of The Books of Jacob and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

‘Georgi Gospodinov is one of the most interesting and innovative writers of this century’

Camilla Grudova, author of Children of Paradise

‘Gospodinov is one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists’

Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

‘Clear-sighted, foreboding, enigmatic’

Sandro Veronesi, author of The Hummingbird

‘Gospodinov, one of Bulgaria’s most popular contemporary writers, is a nostalgia artist. In the manner of Orhan Pamuk and Andreï Makine, his books are preoccupied with memory, its ambiguous pleasures and its wistful, melancholy attraction … This difficult but rewarding novel concludes with an image of Europe brought to the brink of renewed conflict – an abstraction that recent events have imbued with the terrible force of reality’

Wall Street Journal

Contents

Praise for Georgi Gospodinov

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

About the author

Also by Georgi Gospodinov

Copyright