Georgi Gospodinov photographed for the New Statesman by Suzie Howell When Georgi Gospodinov was a young boy his grandmother baptised him and his younger brother and told the children not to tell their parents. This was the 1970s in Bulgaria, a socialist republic ruled by the Bulgarian Communist Party and a loyal satellite state of the Soviet Union. Practising Christianity was illegal. Gospodinov, now 55, remembers his grandmother reading the Bible, which she kept wrapped up in an official communist newspaper. “We would both be sitting there and she would be whispering,” his voice took on a dramatic hush, as,...