Time Shelter is as much a philosophical satire as a novel. It opens as the story of a man called Gaustine developing therapy centres for people with dementia, where they can revive their broken memories by spending time in rooms identical to ones from their youth. But soon the concept catches on and the novel opens up into a political fantasy (in the style of José Saramago) that explores ideas around memory, identity, nostalgia, populist politics and European history, drawing on the narrator’s own experiences of life in Bulgaria over the past 50 years, with metafictional elements thrown in.