The Physics of Sorrow

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