The Housekeeper and the Professor (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099521341
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

The Housekeeper and the Professor (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

Formats & editions
Paperback
3 Dec 2019
Paperback
1 Jul 2010
EBook
1 Sep 2010
Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Your Bookstore Abbeys Boomerang Find local retailers Find local retailers Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Mighty Ape

An enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.

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.
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099521341
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

About the author

Yoko Ogawa

Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her works include The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge.

portrait photo of Yoko Ogawa

Also by Yoko Ogawa

The Memory Police
Mina's Matchbox
Revenge
Hotel Iris
The Diving Pool
See all

Praise for The Housekeeper and the Professor (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching.

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

Alive with mysteries both mathematical and personal, this novel has the pared-down elegance of an equation

Oprah magazine

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

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
penguin pop image
penguin pop image