Time Shelter

Time Shelter opens in a clinic run by the enigmatic psychiatrist Gaustine, built specifically for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor is furnished to reproduce a single decade in exacting detail — the furniture, the light, the smell of the rooms — so patients can be gently returned to a time they still remember. The narrator, Gaustine's assistant, is tasked with tracking down the flotsam of vanished decades, from 1960s chairs to 1940s shirt buttons, to keep the illusion intact.

The premise escalates: as word spreads, people with nothing wrong with their memories start seeking refuge in the clinic from the difficulty of the present, and the idea outgrows its walls. Countries across Europe begin holding referendums on which past decade to collectively move back into, as the past starts to colonize the present on a continental scale.

Written by the Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov and translated by Angela Rodel, the novel is literary fiction shot through with philosophy and satire — described by reviewers as funny and frightening in turn, and concerned above all with the seductive dangers of nostalgia, from the memory of communism to Brexit. It won the 2023 International Booker Prize, the first Bulgarian-language work to do so.