Time Shelter

In Zurich, a clinician named Gaustine opens the first "clinic for the past," where rooms are staged as the decade each Alzheimer's patient remembers most clearly. Healthy people start checking in to escape the present. The Bulgarian narrator helps Gaustine source the period details and finds the project spreading across Europe, until whole countries hold referendums on which decade of the 20th century to return to. Gospodinov uses the premise as a frame for essayistic interludes on Bulgarian history, European memory politics, and the moral cost of nostalgia, building a philosophical novel that earned the 2023 International Booker Prize.