The Physics of Sorrow

The “quirky [and] compulsively readable” (New York Times) precursor to the 2023 International Booker Prize–winning Time Shelter.

Written with a “formal playfulness [that] suggests Kundera with A.D.D.” (Village Voice), Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow became an underground cult classic upon its 2012 release. In a radical reimagining of the minotaur myth, a narrator named Georgi meanders through the past to find the melancholy child at the center of it all. Spanning from antiquity to the Anthropocene, he catalogs curious instances of abandonment, recounts scenes of a turbulent boyhood in 1970s Bulgaria, and even has a bizarre run-in with an eccentric flâneur named Gaustine. The result is a profoundly moving portrait of communist Bulgaria, in which the “real quest… is to find a way to live with sadness, to allow it to be a source of empathy and salutary hesitation,” (Garth Greenwell, New Yorker).

Winner of the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature and finalist for both the PEN Literary Award for Translation and the Strega Europeo.