The Housekeeper and the Professor

Vintage, 2003. Paperback. New. Beautiful, brilliant and profoundly strange - discover Yoko Ogawa. He is a brilliant maths professor who lives with only eighty minutes of sho rt-term memory. She is a sensitive and astute young housekeeper who is entrusted to take ca re of him. Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Profe ssor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still aliv e with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - b ased 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 ea ch new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious th an 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 wh ich 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.