He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem—ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper—with a ten-year-old son—who is hired to care for the Professor. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor's mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities—like the Housekeeper's shoe size—and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away. Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.
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"I listen to around 13 - 18 books a month a various platforms. I listened to this one last October and the story is still quite crisp in my mind."
— Cem Baysal (4 out of 5 stars)
“Ogawa weaves a poignant tale of beauty, heart, and sorrow in her exquisite new novel.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Narrator Cassandra Campbell’s crisp diction and soft tones suit the precision of the book and the subtle but engaging personality of the housekeeper.”
— Library Journal“A mysterious, suspenseful, and radiant fable.”
— BooklistOgawa weaves a poignant tale of beauty, heart and sorrow in her exquisite new novel.
— Publishers Weekly Starred ReviewYoko Ogawa is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Hotel Iris, The Gift of Numbers, and The Diving Pool. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. She is the recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and several Japanese literary awards, including the Kyoza Izumi Prize and the Tanizaki Prize.
Cassandra Campbell has won multiple Audie Awards, Earphones Awards, and the prestigious Odyssey Award for narration. She was been named a “Best Voice” by AudioFile magazine and in 2018 was inducted in Audible’s inaugural Narrator Hall of Fame.