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.
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Paperback, good condition. Slight crease on lower left front cover corner. No creases on spine, pages are clean.
Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024 (first published 2015).
ISBN: 9781399623131