The Man with Many Names

A man and a woman, who have only known each other for a few hours and must soon part, sit in an airport café and invent an entire shared life together. A girl born with two different eyes—one seeing only the past and the other only the future—strives for the unattainable now. Late at night a father conspiratorially 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 poppy-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 shop window TV, 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 had begun to witness the world's very last dying of the light.

From the International Booker Prize-winning Georgi Gospodinov, comes a collection of his finest short stories. They are told with 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. Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel.