The Man with Many Names

‘A WRITER OF GREAT WARMTH AS WELL AS SKILL’ GUARDIAN

A man and a woman, who have only known each other for a few hours and must soon part, sit in an airport cafe and invent an entire shared life together.

A father, wearing only his underpants, hangs laundry between two cherry trees in a tiny Bulgarian town in the 1970s and sets off a series of events that will turn absurdly historic.

A woman on a train passing through the dandelion-filled central European countryside waves at everyone she passes, unaware that a single gesture can ripple through another’s life like fate.

A lonely drifter on a snowy New Year’s Eve sees himself mirrored in a TV in a shop window, every move presumably watched by unseen millions and a world that had forgotten him.

A celebrated connoisseur of sunsets returns to the town where his absurd, lucrative career began to witness the world’s very last dying of the light.

From the International Booker Prize-winning author Georgi Gospodinov, comes a collection of his finest short stories. Each has one eye on the past, one on the future; an ear for the crucial detail that everyone else is missing; and the ability to reveal the ever-changing, ever-beautiful world as you have never seen it before.