W&N
W&N
W&N
From the International Booker Prize-winning author of Time Shelter, this kaleidoscopic 'novel of beginnings' offers a portrait of a man who can wander uninvited into other people's memories
'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
Inventive, ambitious, thought-provoking and entertaining . . . Vividly evoking life in Mitteleuropa under Communist rule - The Literary Review
For all Gospodinov's obsession with sorrow, he is a trickster at heart, and often very funny. The real quest in The Physics of Sorrow is to find a way to live with sadness, to allow it to be a source of empathy and salutary hesitation and not a cause of "savage fear"