Care Santos recommends Gospodinov's reflections on the end of his father's life.

BarcelonaIn The Gardener and Death, Bulgarian writer Georgy Gospodinov (Iámbolo, 1968) offers an autobiographical story about a son who, day after day, sees how his father, Diño Gospodinov, an ironic and vital man, fades away due to illness. He tells this through an interior monologue. The book, published by Edicions del Periscopi and translated into Catalan by Marc Casals, is recommended by writer Care Santos. "More than a book about death, it's a book about the end of life. In addition, it has the added value that Gospodinov wrote it because he needed to. He not only talks about a man who is gone forever, but also about his landscape and his history. And in doing so, he retains everything," says the writer, who this year published The love that passes (Column), which tells the love story of his parents.

Gospodinov also talks about a generation, that of Bulgarian men born at the end of World War II. However, it is above all a meditative book. As he explained Anna Carreras in theNow We Read, the Bulgarian author writes an elegiac novel: "Memory – the only real form of immortality – and identity add to the thematic strengths ofThe Gardener and Death, since it is suggested that, when death separates us, memory is the great way to give continuity to existence."

Last year Gospodinov was in Barcelona to talk, among other things, about another of his books published by Periscopi: The shelter of time,in whatImagine the worrying consolidation of populisms in Europe based on a singular idea: the creation of time clinics for people affected by Alzheimer's and other types of dementia. In an interview in the ARA, defined the book recommended by Care Santos this way: "It's a novel about my father, who died after a month of illness. My father was a gardener and now he has become a garden. Taking care of the plants my father had is a way of prolonging his life."