Georgi Gospodinov · 2020 · exile

International Booker 2023. A clinic in Zurich furnishes each floor as a different decade so that patients losing their memories can live somewhere they recognise - and then the healthy start asking to be admitted, and eventually every country in Europe holds a referendum on which decade to go back to.

1. 1
   Zurich

   Gaustin opens the first clinic for the past: floors furnished as decades, so people losing their memories can live in a year they recognise - and the narrator is hired to collect the smells and songs that make a decade convincing.

2. 2
   Vienna

   The clinics spread, and then the healthy start wanting in - and Gospodinov's premise turns from a treatment for dementia into a European condition, which is the move the whole book is built on.

3. 3
   Berlin

   A continent that has spent thirty years being told history ended decides it would rather have some back - and every country in the Union prepares a referendum on which decade to return to and stay in.

4. 4
   Brussels

   The referendums are organised, campaigned and counted, and the results are national in the worst way - Germany choosing one decade, France another, and borders going up between people living in different years.

5. 5
   Sofia

   Bulgaria votes, and the narrator goes home to a country reconstructing the 1980s in earnest - and Gospodinov, who grew up in them, writes the funniest and least forgiving pages in a book that won the International Booker in 2023.