Death and the Gardener

<p><h3><i><b>My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.</b> </i></h3> <br> A man sits by his father''s bedside and reports radically and gently until a final winter morning.<br><br> His father was one of that generation of tragic smokers born right after the World War II in Bulgaria, who clung to the snorkels of their cigarettes. A rebel without a cause, he knew how to fail with heroic self-deprecation.<br><br> The garden he created out of a barren village yard first saved him, then killed him It remains his living legacy: peonies and potatoes, roses and cherry trees - and endless stories.<br><br> But without him, his son''s past, with all its afternoons, began to quietly crack. Because the end of our fathers is the end of a world.<br><br> From the winner of the International Booker Prize, comes a novel about a father, a son, and an orphaned garden in a fading world that spans from ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia, interweaving the botany of sorrow, the consolations of storytelling and the arrival of the first tulips of spring.</p>