The Housekeeper and the Professor (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching.

Paul Auster

Ogawa weaves a poignant tale of beauty, heart and sorrow in her exquisite new novel...gorgeous

Publishers Weekly

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

Strangely charming, flecked with enough wit and mystery to keep us engaged throughout... fairy-tale surrealism and quiet spiritual wisdom

Washington Post

This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water...Dive into Yoko Ogawa's world and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen

New York 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

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

It's short, quiet and perfectly formed, an elegant story.

Alastair Mabbott, Glasgow Herald

It is a miracle of a book

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

Yet again, the extraordinary Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa casts her spell in this gentle tale of mesmerising pathos

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

..this was a novel that I cannot shake from my mind

Alyson Rudd, The Times

This is a marvellous book...I felt a real sense of loss on reaching the end.

The Times Book Club

Where Yoko Ogawa's brilliance lies is in taking such an apparently stiff framework and bending it into a work of warmth and beauty; or showing us that mathematics is not a cold, hard, science, but an elegant, complex, shimmering art. This feat of literary spoon-bending is accomplished with such calm elegance that it quite takes the breath away

Sarah Vine, The Times Book Club

A charming, slight and well-told story.

Tom Chesshyre, The Times Book Club

Ogawa left this reader moved and with his faith in the potential goodness of humans reaffirmed

Damien Whitworth, The Times