The Physics of Sorrow

• Winner of the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature

• Winner of 2019 Central European Angelus Award

• Finalist for the 2015 PEN Literary Award for Translation

***

In a radical reimagining of the Minotaur myth, a narrator named Georgi constructs the story of his life like a labyrinth, meandering through the past to find the melancholy child at the centre of it all

Spanning from antiquity to the Anthropocene, he catalogues curious instances of abandonment, recounts scenes of a turbulent boyhood in 1970s Bulgaria, and has a bizarre run-in with an eccentric flaneur named Gaustine.

The Physics of Sorrow is a dazzlingly inventive, sharply funny, mind-expanding novel from the author of Time Shelter and one of Europe's most important writers.

***

'Inventive, ambitious, thought-provoking and entertaining... Vividly evoking life in Mitteleuropa under Communist rule'

- LITERARY REVIEW

'For all Gospodinov's obsession with sorrow, he is ajrickster at heart, and often very funny. The real quest in Sorrowis to find a way to live with sadness to be a source of empathy9

- ENWELL, NEW YORKER