This is a collection of stories about our fathers who, although physically gone, are nevertheless always present. These poetic essays deliver a book about life, death, and loss; about happiness, which is always intimately personal; about life’s fundamental lessons and the communication between generations. Besides drawing a dispersed but convincing portrait of life from the years of World War II through the Cold War era to the beginning of the twenty-first century, the stories included in the anthology are also of great literary quality and artistic value. And though they offer elements of history and national psychology, their messages are universal.

“This is a book that you read with a lump in your throat, through the magnifying glass of tears . . . It’s a book about the sudden end of childhood, regardless of how old you might be. It’s about all of us who are silently carrying the unbearable thought of becoming orphaned ourselves. And about the relief of once again confirming that death doesn’t exist and fathers never go away. These stories about the Bulgarian father—and the character that he is—also reveal Bulgaria’s untold history of the past half century. A very personal and moving book.”

Georgi Gospodinov, author of The Physics of Sorrow