The Physics of Sorrow

‘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