whatcathyread

When I was a small child we lived next door to an old woman. Her name was Mrs Billington, and some nights she’d roam the street like a ghost, in slippers and a long, white nightgown, her white hair loose around her shoulders, looking for her mother.

Mrs B gets ‘confused’, my mother told me.

According to the Alzheimer’s Society’s website, 1 in 3 people born in the UK today will be diagnosed with dementia in their lifetime. That’s a scary statistic, and presumably why AS spend so much on research to improve care and find a cure.

In Time Shelter, enigmatic Gaustine sets up a “clinic of the past” for people with dementia. His idea is simple: furnish rooms and floors to replicate different decades so people can live somewhere “in sync with their internal time”.

But what if healthy people decide that to “hide in the cave of the past” is better than living in the present? What if demand for a “bomb shelter of the past…the time shelter” extends beyond rooms, floors and clinics, and explodes into cities – entire countries, even.  What would rolling back the years in an “absolutely authentic” way really look like? And if different countries choose different decades in an EU-wide referendum, what would that mean for the Continent of Europe?

Gospodinv’s novel is a funny and frightening exploration of time, memory and identity, both individual and national, and a reminder that no, life wasn’t always better way back when – it’s human nature to forget the bad things. Or, to coin Aesop: be careful what you wish for, lest it come true…

Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize in 2023. It was translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. Rating: *** Highly recommended