The Housekeeper and the Professor: ‘a poignant tale of beauty, heart and sorrow’ Publishers Weekly
Yoko Ogawa
He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.
She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take care of him.
Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.
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About Yoko Ogawa
Reviews for The Housekeeper and the Professor: ‘a poignant tale of beauty, heart and sorrow’ Publishers Weekly
Paul Auster
A perfectly sustained novel (a tribute to Stephen Snyder's smooth translation); like a note prolonged...a pause enabling us to peer intently into the lives of its characters...has all the charm and restraint of any by Ishiguro and the whimsy of Murakami
Los Angeles Times
Beautiful...the extraordinary Yoko Ogawa casts her spell. Never before has the beauty of maths been so lovingly explored...a tender, gentle book...Ogawa is an original and establishes a world in a paragraph..This is a tale which will leave the reader gasping...Hopefully more of her exciting, thoughtful fiction is heading our way.
Irish Times
Its unnamed characters suggest archetype or myth; its rapturous concentration on the details of weather and cooking provide a satisfyingly textured foundation
Guardian
Alive with mysteries both mathematical and personal, this novel has the pared-down elegance of an equation
Oprah magazine
Ogawa's crystalline prose heightens the simple elegance of this tale of lost souls looking for comfort and shelter - and finding it in the timeless symmetry of mathematical equations.
Metro