The Housekeeper and the Professor

Beautiful, brilliant and profoundly strange - discover Yoko Ogawa. He is a brilliant maths professor who lives with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is a sensitive and 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. 'Has all the charm and restraint of any novel by Ishiguro and the whimsy of Murakami' Los Angeles Times 'Beautiful...the extraordinary Yoko Ogawa casts her spell... This a tale which will leave the reader gasping' Irish Times 'A poignant domestic drama of tender atmospherics and stealthy education...rapturous' Guardian '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