The Physics of Sorrow

'I am we,' says the narrator, a man named Georgi who rebuilds his life as a maze of corridors, detours and rooms, drawn to the old myth of the Minotaur. He speaks from many places: from the underground labyrinth, from a cellar at the end of the war, from the basement flat in 1970s and 1980s Bulgaria where much of his uneasy boyhood was spent, from an old bomb shelter tomorrow. Mixing past and present, myth and document, he gathers stories of abandoned creatures of every kind, recalls his odd meetings with a wandering eccentric named Gaustine, and makes capsules of fragile things for whoever is still to come: a post-apocalyptic reader, a god or a snail. A novel about empathy and how it fades, the world's autumn, the minotaurs locked inside us and the endless time of childhood.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Length

342 pages in the original

First published

2012 by Janet 45

Author's age

44 when first published

ISBN

9789544917616 (original)

9781940953090 (Open Letter, United States)

9781399623131 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, United Kingdom)

9781324094890 (Liveright, United States)