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TIME SHELTER

by Georgi Gospodinov translated by Angela Rodel ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 10, 2022

An ambitious, quirky, time-folding yarn.

A clinic invites Europeans to live in the past, with all the comforts and perils that doing so brings.

The unnamed narrator of Bulgarian author Gospodinov’s third novel translated into English has stumbled into the orbit of Gaustine, who’s opened a facility in Zurich for people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia—“those who already are living solely in the present of their past,” as he puts it. Memory care is a legitimate treatment for such patients, but Gospodinov’s digressive, philosophical novel is less a work of realist literature than an allegory about the perils of looking backward and attempting to make Switzerland (or Sweden or Germany...) great again. As the popularity of the clinic expands—with different floors dedicated to different decades of the 20th century—the narrator alternates between sketches of various patients and ruminations about modern European history (particularly that of his native Bulgaria) and how time is treated by authors like Thomas Mann, W.H. Auden, and Homer. Eventually, the novel expands into a kind of dark satire of nostalgia and patriotism as more clinics emerge and various European countries hold referendums to decide which point in time it wishes to live in. (France picks the 1980s; Switzerland, forever neutral, votes to live in the day of the referendum.) But, of course, attempting to live in the past doesn’t mean you can stay there. Though the story at times meanders, translator Rodel keeps the narrator’s wry voice consistent. And in its brisker latter chapters, the story achieves a pleasurably Borges-ian strangeness while sending a warning signal about how memory can be glitch-y and dangerous. As Gaustine puts it: “The more a society forgets, the more someone produces, sells, and fills the freed-up niches with ersatz-memory.”

Pub Date: May 10, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-324-09095-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Liveright/Norton

Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | FANTASY | SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Georgi Gospodinov ; translated by Angela Rodel

by Georgi Gospodinov & translated by Zornitsa Hristova

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THE LIFE IMPOSSIBLE

by Matt Haig ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 2024

Haig’s positive message will keep his fans happy.

A British widow travels to Ibiza and learns that it’s never too late to have a happy life.

In a world that seems to be getting more unstable by the moment, Haig’s novels are a steady ship in rough seas, offering a much-needed positive message. In works like the bestselling The Midnight Library (2020), he reminds us that finding out what you truly love and where you belong in the universe are the foundations of building a better existence. His latest book continues this upbeat messaging, albeit in a somewhat repetitive and facile way. Retired British schoolteacher Grace Winters discovers that an old acquaintance has died and left her a ramshackle home in Ibiza. A widow who lost her only child years earlier, Grace is at first reluctant to visit the house, because, at 72, she more or less believes her chance for happiness is over—but when she rouses herself to travel to the island, she discovers the opposite is true. A mystery surrounds her friend’s death involving a roguish islander, his activist daughter, an internationally famous DJ, and a strange glow in the sea that acts as a powerful life force and upends Grace’s ideas of how the cosmos works. Framed as a response to a former student’s email, the narrative follows Grace’s journey from skeptic (she was a math teacher, after all) to believer in the possibility of magic as she learns to move on from the past. Her transformation is the book’s main conflict, aside from a protest against an evil developer intent on destroying Ibiza’s natural beauty. The outcome is never in doubt, and though the story often feels stretched to the limit—this novel could have easily been a novella—the author’s insistence on the power of connection to change lives comes through loud and clear.

Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024

ISBN: 9780593489277

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

BY ANY OTHER NAME

by Jodi Picoult ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2024

A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.

Who was Shakespeare?

Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name , “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.

Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024

ISBN: 9780593497210

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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The Best Fiction Books » New Literary Fiction

Time shelter: a novel, by angela rodel (translator) & georgi gospodinov.

🏆 Winner of the 2023 International Booker Prize

A ‘clinic for the past’ offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: nostalgia. Each floor of the clinic reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back to their preferred time and the reader into European history. Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel, is the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s third novel, and the first Bulgarian book to be nominated for the International Booker Prize. The judging panel said it was “an inventive, subversive and morbidly humorous novel about national identities and the seductive dangers of memory and nostalgia.” Time Shelter was first published in Bulgaria in 2020.

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Book Summary and Reviews of Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

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Time Shelter

by Georgi Gospodinov

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• Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
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Book summary.

An award-winning international sensation―with a second-act dystopian twist― Time Shelter is a tour de force set in a world clamoring for the past before it forgets.

"At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created," begins Time Shelter's enigmatic narrator, who will go unnamed. "In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ." But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a "vagrant in time" who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century. In an apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by curiously planted forget-me-nots, Gaustine has opened the first "clinic for the past," an institution that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time to unlock what is left of their fading memories. Serving as Gaustine's assistant, the narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to nostalgic scents and even wisps of afternoon light. But as the charade becomes more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic to escape from the dead-end of their daily lives―a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop time itself.

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Media reviews, reader reviews.

"Gospodinov's digressive, philosophical novel is less a work of realist literature than an allegory about the perils of looking backward and attempting to make Switzerland (or Sweden or Germany...) great again ... translator Rodel keeps the narrator's wry voice consistent ... And in its brisker latter chapters, the story achieves a pleasurably Borges-ian strangeness while sending a warning signal about how memory can be glitch-y and dangerous ... An ambitious, quirky, time-folding yarn." ― Kirkus Reviews "A radical new therapy tests the power of nostalgia in the electric and fantastical latest from Gospodinov ( The Physics of Sorrow ). The clever prose sells the zany premise and imbues it with poignant longing: 'Everything happens years after it has happened... Most likely 1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid.' Thought-provoking and laced with potent satire, this deserves a spot next to Kafka." ― Publishers Weekly "[An] antic fantasy of European politics... 'History is still news,' Gospodinov writes, cunningly drawing attention to the violence that the past wreaks on the present." ― The New Yorker "The elegant translation and the short, lyrical chapters in this dystopian tale offer a poignant ode to the dual tragedies of personal and universal memory loss." ― Booklist "Mr. Gospodinov, one of Bulgaria's most popular contemporary writers, is a nostalgia artist. In the manner of Orhan Pamuk and Andreï Makine, his books are preoccupied with memory, its ambiguous pleasures and its wistful, melancholy attraction...This difficult but rewarding novel concludes with an image of Europe brought to the brink of renewed conflict―an abstraction that recent events have imbued with the terrible force of reality." ― Wall Street Journal "The morality of artificially returning people to the past, and the broader question of whether this truly brings solace ― whether indulgence in nostalgia is curative or pernicious ― is the central question of Georgi Gospodinov's newly translated novel… Adroit execution of such wordplay is a testament to the talent of the novel's translator, Angela Rodel. [Gospodinov] is sympathetic to the poignancy of things from before ― obsolete objects, old brands of coffee, the skipping of antique records ― but rebuffs the scapegoats of globalism, immigration and modernization that supposedly killed them off; we are all complicit in the destruction of history, and going backward can only mean intolerance and the exaltation of traditionalist kitsch. It's impossible, when reading all this, not to think of the reactionary sentiments behind Brexit and MAGA and even Putin's Greater Russia irredentism, but Gospodinov is too delicate to resort to crude political satire.… Touching and intelligent." ― New York Times Book Review "A chronicle of time itself: this is the ambitious task undertaken by Georgi Gospodinov, Bulgaria's greatest living writer and annalist of an entire nation's endless complaints and missed chances, in his Strega Prize–winning novel Time Shelter. ... Finished in Berlin just as COVID was on the verge of sweeping through Europe, the novel is at times unnervingly prescient as it issues warnings against the perils of infection ― physical, political, even metaphysical.... A poet at heart, Gospodinov can also write a novel in a single sentence: 'The past is my home country….' He uses the absurdities of the very specific universe of Bulgarian pain, of Bulgarian provincial poverty, to unveil deep wounds…. Angela Rodel, the most prolific and accomplished translator of Bulgarian literature into English, carries over Gospodinov's grand, flowing Bulgarian sentences… into vivid English…. Rodel is part of a grouping of extraordinary women translators working to preserve linguistic diversity.... who are today producing and exporting some of the most compelling and interesting contemporary literature from Bulgaria." ― Astra

Author Information

Georgi gospodinov.

Georgi Gospodinov is the author of Natural Novel translated into more than 20 languages, The Physics of Sorrow which won the 2019 European Angelus Award and the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize, and the most recent novel, Time Shelter , winner of the 2021 Premio Strega Europeo. Smuggling poetry into fiction, his style is both poetic and philosophical yet readable, funny, and self-ironic. According to Olga Tokarczuk, Time Shelter is the most exquisite kind of literature.

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Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov review – the dangers of dwelling in the past

From communism to the Brexit referendum and conflict in Europe, this funny yet frightening Bulgarian novel explores the weaponisation of nostalgia

L ife behind the iron curtain was an education in a certain kind of humour: dark, unsentimental and absurd. It understood that jokes had become shortcuts to the truth – apart from the bonus of laughter, they turned the wooden language of the regime against itself in ways that sincerity could not. My favourite joke from my time in 1980s Romania was: “Under communism, the future is always certain; it’s the past that keeps changing.” From the vantage point of 2022, it’s clear that this wasn’t just true of communism, and that the joke, if we can still bear to laugh at it, is also on us.

Time Shelter is Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s third novel, and for all its focus on the apparently bygone, it could not be more timely. A mysterious therapist, Gaustine, founds a clinic that treats patients with Alzheimer’s by recreating the pasts in which they felt most secure. The “past-clinic” begins with different rooms and floors, decorated with a completist’s precision and an obsessive’s eye for detail: particular cigarette brands, lampshades, wallpaper, archive magazines … Decade by decade, therapeutic time-shelters allow patients to inhabit their temporal “safe spaces”.

The clinic is not just a place where Gaustine treats patients; it is also the perfect conceit for Gospodinov’s narrator to explore the 20th century in Europe through the vanishing points of traumatised or broken individuals. It’s as if Oliver Sacks and WG Sebald had collaborated on a Europe-wide chain of treatment centres. A former secret policeman arrives with his former quarry, who now has dementia. The police officer has become his prosthetic memory, restoring moments of happiness to the man he once persecuted and informed on. In one of the book’s many dark jokes, a Romanian patient finds solace in remembering not what he experienced but what he fantasised about: a life in the US. Nostalgia is not about what you had, but a memory of what you wanted: a backdated cheque from a nonexistent bank that somehow always pays out.

Some patients have memories that are better left untapped: in one harrowing case, Gaustine treats a woman who cannot bear to be near showers. He discovers that she is a Holocaust survivor, prompting him to reflect that memory is not a good in itself, and that the right kind of forgetting is also therapeutically necessary. Gaustine writes that the more past there is, the less memory we have. Differentiating the past from memory becomes important later in the novel, when Gaustine’s idea is hijacked – as it was always going to be – by politicians.

The clinic is so successful that clients with no ailments gravitate towards it. Everyone wants a piece of the past. A radio station plays entire days from specific decades. Gaustine imagines towns and cities fixed in particular eras; soon, whole countries want to emulate his idea. Across Europe, political parties promote different decades in their national histories. Referendums are fought on what particular past a country’s future will look like. It’s funny and absurd, but it’s also frightening, because even as Gospodinov plays with the idea as fiction, the reader begins to recognise something rather closer to home. Time Shelter was written between the Brexit referendum and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both of which represent, in their own ways, the weaponisation of nostalgia and the selection of particular eras in the time clinic of the not-so-new world order.

The Brexit referendum is invoked here as a prototype (our politicians would say “world-leading”) for the fictional referendums that break out across Europe. In the film that I hope will be made of this novel, I imagine crowd scenes and political rallies with people chanting slogans like, “What do we want? Then! When do we want it? Now!” True to form, Gospodinov finds humour in the bleakness, as Europe proves, yet again, that knowing history is no bar to repeating it. He has fun with national stereotypes: “If Scandinavia couldn’t decide which of its happy periods to choose, Romania was also racked by doubt, but for opposite reasons.”

This novel could have been a clever, high-concept intellectual game with little by way of emotional investment, but Gospodinov is a writer of great warmth as well as skill. His narrator bears close relation to Gospodinov himself: a Bulgarian, born in 1968, for whom the end of communism remains, as it remains in a ghostly way in this novel, a meeting point of past and present. His affection for that period is sincere but also without illusion. He can draw out fully dimensional characters from the broken details of their fractured memories. His transitions – between humour and sadness, absurd situationism and reverberating tragedy, pathos and ironic observation – are never obtrusive. Thanks to the skill and delicacy of Angela Rodel’s translation, these qualities are in abundant display for the anglophone reader.

The novel’s title – Time Shelter – is a neologism in Bulgarian as it is in English, a grafting from the noun “bomb shelter”. It’s well found in its ambiguity: sheltering from time, and sheltering within time. Both are attractive but impossible. Nostalgia used to feel like a source of harmless escape, and occasional sustenance. It is starting to seem like a fossil fuel, foreshortening our future as it burns.

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Georgi gospodinov and angela rodel win international booker prize for 'time shelter'.

Elizabeth Blair

Translator Angela Rodel, left, and author Georgi Gospodinov have won the 2023 International Booker Prize for Time Shelter. They are pictured above in London on May 23, 2023. David Parry/The Booker Prizes hide caption

Translator Angela Rodel, left, and author Georgi Gospodinov have won the 2023 International Booker Prize for Time Shelter. They are pictured above in London on May 23, 2023.

This year's winner of the The International Booker Prize is a unique spin on time travel. The novel Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, with a translation by Angela Rodel, imagines the 'first clinic of the past,' in which Alzheimer's patients can visit different time periods of their lives on different floors.

"One day, when this business really takes off," therapist Gaustine tells the narrator, a writer, "we'll create these clinics or sanatoriums in various countries. The past is also a local thing. There'll be houses from various years everywhere, little neighborhoods, one day we'll even have small cities, maybe even a whole country. For patients with failing memories, Alzheimer's, dementia, whatever you want to call it. For all of those who already are living solely in the present of their past."

In its review of Time Shelter , The Guardian wrote, "From communism to the Brexit referendum and conflict in Europe, this funny yet frightening Bulgarian novel explores the weaponisation of nostalgia."

Gospodinov's novel was chosen from a shortlist of six books from around the world.

"Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel," wrote the International Booker Prize jury, " Time Shelter cements Georgi Gospodinov's reputation as one of the indispensable writers of our times, and a major voice in international literature."

Unlike the original Booker Prize which rewards novels written in English, the International Booker Prize honors fiction translated into English from around the world. This is the first time a Bulgarian novel has won.

Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel will share the prize money of roughly $62,ooo equally. In addition, the shortlisted authors and translators each receive approximately $3,000.

Time Shelter is Gospodinov's third novel to be published in English. A poet and playwright, he is the most translated writer from Bulgaria to emerge since the fall of communism.

Literary translator Angela Rodel is a Minnesota native who lives in Bulgaria. In addition to Time Shelter , she translated Gospodinov's novel The Physics of Sorrow , as well as a short story collection by Bulgarian writer Georgi Tenev.

In a statement, Gospodinov said, "It is commonly assumed that 'big themes' are reserved for 'big literatures,' or literatures written in big languages, while small languages, somehow by default, are left with the local and the exotic. Awards like the International Booker Prize are changing that status quo, and this is very important."

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Time Shelter: Winner of the International Booker Prize 2023 Kindle Edition

A GUARDIAN AND FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'The most exquisite kind of literature... I've put it on a special shelf in my library that I reserve for books that demand to be revisited every now and then. ' OLGA TOKARCZUK, author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead 'Could not be more timely... It's funny and absurd, but it's also frightening, because even as Gospodinov plays with the idea as fiction, the reader begins to recognise something rather closer to home... A writer of great warmth as well as skill ' GUARDIAN 'In equal measure playful and profound, Time Shelter renders the philosophical mesmerizing, and the everyday extraordinary. I loved it' CLAIRE MESSUD, author of The Woman Upstairs 'A genrebusting novel of ideas... Gospodinov's vision of tomorrow is the nightmare from which Europe knows it must awake. And accident, in combination with the book's own merits, may just have created a classic' THE TIMES 'Gospodinov is one of Europe's most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists, and this his most expansive, soulful and mind-bending book' DAVE EGGERS, author of The Circle 'Touching and intelligent' NEW YORK TIMES 'A powerful and brilliant novel: clear-sighted, foreboding, enigmatic' SANDRO VERONESI, author of The Hummingbird 'An immensely enjoyable book which achieves depth with an affable narrative voice' IRISH TIMES In Time Shelter , an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a 'clinic for the past' that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. As Gaustine's assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a 'time shelter', hoping to escape from the horrors of our present - a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter cements Georgi Gospodinov's reputation as one of the indispensable writers of our times, a major voice in international literature. Georgi Gospodinov is one of Europe's most acclaimed writers. Originally from Bulgaria, his novels have won his country's most prestigious literary prize twice and have been shortlisted for more than a dozen international prizes - including the 2015 PEN Literary Award for Translation, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, the Premio Strega Europeo, the Bruecke Berlin Preis, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Literaturpreis. He has won the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the 2019 Angelus Literature Central Europe Prize and the 2021 Premio Strega Europeo, among others.

• Print length 298 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Publication date 12 May 2022
• File size 9539 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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"Georgi Gospodinov is unique in many ways. I've been reading him since the beginning and I know that no one can combine an intriguing concept, wonderful imagination, and perfect writing technique like he can." --Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize-winning author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

"Gospodinov is one of Europe's most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists, and this his most expansive, soulful and mind-bending book." --Dave Eggers

"In equal measure playful and profound, Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter renders the philosophical mesmerizing, and the everyday extraordinary. I loved it." --Claire Messud

"In this book, time sneaks away and then returns, reconstituted. Franz Ferdinand is re-assassinated. The cigarettes you liked as a teenager are on sale again. Communism is back, and nice. The book is a satire, witty and scorching, but it is also wise and tender. Your grandmother is there." --Joan Acocella, The New Yorker staff writer

"Gospodinov writes like a botanist of the soul: he knows the effects of the pretty mushrooms and the hidden herbs within ourselves in spite of what they look like from afar. The living beings he studies are our versions of our past, the unretrievable, the recreated, the future versions of our past, and how we imbue them with the fantasies and poisons that we cultivate in silence." --Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

" Time Shelter is an extraordinary romp through time and memory, a beautifully written and wonderfully inventive meditation on what the past means to us, whether we can recapture it, and how it defines our present. This is the perfect novel for these cloistered, atemporal times." --Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading

"A powerful and brilliant novel: clear-sighted, foreboding, enigmatic . . . in which the future gives way like a rotten beam, and the past rushes in like a flood." --Sandro Veronesi, author of The Hummingbird

About the Author

Angela Rodel is a prolific translator of Bulgarian literature and won the International Booker Prize for translation.

Georgi Gospodinov is one of Bulgaria's most lauded authors. His novel Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize and the Premio Strega Europeo, among other prizes.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B093GZBVMK
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Weidenfeld & Nicolson (12 May 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 9539 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 298 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1474623077
• 19 in Disorders & Diseases
• 33 in Literary Satire Fiction
• 133 in Dystopian Science Fiction (Kindle Store)

About the author

Georgi gospodinov.

Georgi Gospodinov is the author of Natural Novel translated into more than 20 languages, The Physics of Sorrow which won the 2019 European Angelus Award and the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize, and the most recent novel, Time Shelter, winner of the 2021 Premio Strega Europeo. Smuggling poetry into fiction, his style is both poetic and philosophical yet readable, funny, and self-ironic. According to Olga Tokarczuk, Time Shelter is the most exquisite kind of literature.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 32% 28% 23% 12% 5% 32%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 32% 28% 23% 12% 5% 28%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 32% 28% 23% 12% 5% 23%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 32% 28% 23% 12% 5% 12%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 32% 28% 23% 12% 5% 5%

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Customers say

Customers find the book thought-provoking and intriguing. They also describe it as a great read with an interesting concept. Readers appreciate the writing style and find it easy to read. However, some find it difficult to keep their interest in the second half and say the book doesn't make for a satisfying read.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book thought-provoking, with interesting ideas. They say it intrigues them all the way through, with an interesting concept. Readers also mention the beginning and end are clever, moving, and thought- provoking.

"...anything about the book/ plot to avoid any spoilers, but it is extremely clever " Read more

"...and shifting borders between reality and fantasy there is a nice mixture of ideas here that are by turns satirical, moving, bitter-sweet and thought-..." Read more

"...For there are quite a few elegant, poignant, and elegiac passages in this book – such as the author’s reminiscences about his father for instance,..." Read more

" Interesting ideas , easy to read.I will recommend." Read more

Customers find the book readable.

" what an amazing Read ! Provokes lots of thoughts and deep analyses of yourself, the world around. With a Good message and idea! Recommend!!!" Read more

" Excellent book ..." Read more

" Good book ..." Read more

" Great read ..." Read more

Customers find the writing style of the book easy to read.

"Interesting ideas, easy to read .I will recommend." Read more

"I am enjoying the book and I love the writing style and the story so far is intriguing." Read more

"I thought it was easy to read , loved the story. Existential and at the same time digging into the pains of our day. This is a story about each of us...." Read more

"A beautifully written book especialy as it is in translation , what is time ,who am I, ageing and the terror of being senile ...." Read more

Customers find the pacing of the book whimsical, thought-provoking, and clever.

"...For there are quite a few elegant , poignant, and elegiac passages in this book – such as the author’s reminiscences about his father for instance,..." Read more

"I didn't finish this book. I enjoyed what I read. It was whimsical and full of interesting details...." Read more

"Enjoyed. Challenging thought-provoking and very clever ." Read more

Customers find the book difficult to keep their interest in the second half. They say it doesn't make for a satisfying or good read.

"...one over the space of 30 or so pages seems an odd one, and does not make for a great read ...." Read more

"...Whatever - it doesn't make for a satisfying or even good read." Read more

" Difficult to keep my interest in the second half..." Read more

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Insightful, philosophical, and Poignant to the Times. MUST READ!

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Time Shelter

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First person

Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter playlist: the prize-winning novel in 12 songs

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What Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel said after winning the International Booker Prize

Everything you need to know about time shelter, winner of the international booker prize 2023, 'spinning an illusion': what exactly do literary translators do, watch our video q&as with the international booker prize 2023 shortlistees.

Competition

Join the winners of the International Booker Prize for a live Q&A and special film screening

If you loved the international booker prize 2023 shortlist, you'll love these films..., international booker prize 2023: take our shortlist trivia quiz.

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32 books that have inspired the International Booker Prize 2023 shortlistees

Read our interviews with the international booker prize 2023 shortlistees.

Reading guides

Discover our reading guides for the International Booker Prize 2023 shortlist

Reading guide: time shelter by georgi gospodinov, translated by angela rodel, win a set of all six books from the international booker prize 2023 shortlist, angela rodel interview: ‘translators don’t play second fiddle to authors, it’s like a duet’, georgi gospodinov interview: ‘i felt something had gone awry in the clockworks of time', why you should read the international booker prize 2023 shortlist, according to our judges, six things you need to know about the international booker prize 2023 shortlist, why we should celebrate translated fiction, according to our longlistees, interviews with the international booker prize 2023 longlistees, quiz: which book from the international booker prize 2023 longlist should you read, win a set of all 13 books on the international booker prize 2023 longlist, international booker prize 2023: what our judges said about the longlist, the international booker prize 2023 longlist: 13 things you need to know, share this page.

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Can Americans Have Democracy, Freedom and Other Nice Things?

In “On Freedom,” Timothy Snyder looks at what kinds of societies help people thrive.

The Holocaust scholar Timothy Snyder argues that freedom means more than absence of restraint. Credit... Robert Rausch for The New York Times

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By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author, most recently, of “Bloody Panico!: or, Whatever Happened to the Tory Party.”

• Sept. 18, 2024
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ON FREEDOM , by Timothy Snyder

On Nov. 9 it will be 35 years since the Berlin Wall fell. The exhilaration of that moment was followed by high hopes for the spread of democracy throughout Eastern Europe, then in Russia itself when the Soviet Union imploded. Gradually hope gave way to frustration, disappointment and then dismay. Russia did not become a liberal democracy, and nor did a number of its former satrapies.

Few people have had more opportunity and reason to ponder this than Timothy Snyder. Before he became a Yale professor and a prominent historian, he spent several years in Central and Eastern Europe, where he came to know one country after another, learn one language after another, and meet many people, among them those who had been brave dissidents against communist rule in its last decadent phase.

His scholarly work includes his formidable and harrowing book “ Bloodlands ,” which describes the hideous period in the 1930s and ’40s when as many as 14 million people perished one way or another at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, with Ukraine a particularly awful mass grave. When he published that book 14 years ago, he must have hoped — didn’t we all? — that such large-scale bloodshed wouldn’t be seen there again.

He has also written political and polemical journalism and books, notably “ On Tyranny ” (2017). Inspired by the numb horror he and so many Americans like him felt at the election of Donald Trump, the book looked back at the way 20th-century fascism had so widely succeeded in Europe, not least by using democratic means to destroy democracy. Snyder sought lessons which might help guard against any such American disaster, even as in my view the suggested historical comparison doesn’t really work. There may be an American people, but there is no American Volk , and the objective conditions for anything that could be called fascism don’t exist in the United States, although there might yet well be something very nasty.

Now, as another election approaches, Snyder has returned with “On Freedom.” A longer antithetical companion to the earlier book, it is part memoir, part meditation and part manifesto. Between descriptions of his time in Eastern Europe and reflections on the events there in recent decades, there are invocations of his personal heroes, from European thinkers who lived and died in the Bloodlands days such as the philosophers Simone Weil and Edith Stein , to more recent rebels against despotism such as the former Czech president Václav Havel and the Polish historian Adam Michnik . And there are plenty of sharp phrases: “Donald Trump proved to be a compelling sadopopulist”; “Oligarchs do not just have the biggest piece of the pie. They often have the pie cutter”; “Freedom justifies government.”

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Time Shelter : Winner of the International Booker Prize 2023 Paperback – International Edition, March 30, 2023

• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher HACHETTE
• Publication date March 30, 2023
• Dimensions 5.04 x 0.94 x 7.72 inches
• ISBN-10 1474623077
• ISBN-13 978-1474623070
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HACHETTE; International Edition (March 30, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1474623077
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1474623070
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.5 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.04 x 0.94 x 7.72 inches
• Best Sellers Rank: #535,031 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

About the author

Georgi gospodinov.

Georgi Gospodinov is the author of Natural Novel translated into more than 20 languages, The Physics of Sorrow which won the 2019 European Angelus Award and the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize, and the most recent novel, Time Shelter, winner of the 2021 Premio Strega Europeo. Smuggling poetry into fiction, his style is both poetic and philosophical yet readable, funny, and self-ironic. According to Olga Tokarczuk, Time Shelter is the most exquisite kind of literature.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 42% 29% 19% 7% 3% 42%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 42% 29% 19% 7% 3% 29%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 42% 29% 19% 7% 3% 19%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 42% 29% 19% 7% 3% 7%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 42% 29% 19% 7% 3% 3%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

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Top reviews from other countries

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