Georgi Gospodinov, the Bulgarian novelist and poet, creates a darkly comic narrative that begins with a clinic where Alzheimer's patients find solace in carefully reconstructed past decades. Gaustine, a mysterious figure who may be the narrator's creation or creator, establishes this therapeutic environment where patients can return to the years of their youth through meticulously accurate period details. But the concept proves seductive beyond its medical application: healthy people begin visiting to escape the present, then cities and nations start holding referendums on which decade to inhabit collectively. Europe fractures as different countries retreat into different pasts, forcing the narrator to confront how nostalgia has become a political force capable of destroying the present. Gospodinov's novel won the International Booker Prize for its inventive premise and its unsettling exploration of memory, history, and the human longing to escape time. The book draws on Bulgarian experience of communism and post-communism while speaking to universal questions about how societies relate to their pasts. Gospodinov writes with the wit of Borges and the pathos of Eastern European writers who have watched utopian projects collapse into authoritarianism. Readers will find here both an absorbing narrative and a meditation on whether the desire to recover the past might be the greatest threat to any possible future.