Review
"Clear, undiluted prose [that is] as true and absolute as mathematics itself."--Mainichi Shimbun
"Ogawa has a magical way with words."--Sankei Shimbun
"This year's bestselling novel . . . Infinitely sad and infinitely beautiful . . . Beautiful, moving . . . A skillfully woven story."--Asahi Shimbun
"More than a beautiful story . . . A truly unique documentary of the interior of the human heart . . . The complexity of the human mind and the elegant simplicity of mathematics--this novel bridges the two like a rainbow."--Tosho Shimbun
"Ogawa has a magical way with words."--Sankei Shimbun
"This year's bestselling novel . . . Infinitely sad and infinitely beautiful . . . Beautiful, moving . . . A skillfully woven story."--Asahi Shimbun
"More than a beautiful story . . . A truly unique documentary of the interior of the human heart . . . The complexity of the human mind and the elegant simplicity of mathematics--this novel bridges the two like a rainbow."--Tosho Shimbun
Product Description
Winner of the Yomiuri Literature Prize
Winner of the Honya Taisho (The Booksellers Prize)
Winner of the Sugaku Shuppan-Sho (from the Japanese Academy of Mathematics)
A Japan Foundation Selection
A publishing phenomenon in Japan--and a heartwarming story that will change the way we all see math, baseball, memory, and each other She is a housekeeper by trade, a single mom by choice, shy, brilliant, and starting a new tour of duty in the home of an aging professor. He is the professor, a mathematical genius, capable of limitless kindness and intuitive affection, but the victim of a mysterious accident that has rendered him unable to remember anything for longer than eighty minutes. Root, the housekeeper's ten-year-old son, combines his mother's sympathy with a sensitive curiosity all his own. Over the course of a few months in 1992, these three develop a profoundly affecting friendship, based on a shared love of mathematics and baseball, that will change each of their lives permanently. Chosen as the most popular book in Japan by readers and booksellers alike, The Gift of Numbers is Yoko Ogawa's first novel to be published in English, and in the U.S.
Winner of the Honya Taisho (The Booksellers Prize)
Winner of the Sugaku Shuppan-Sho (from the Japanese Academy of Mathematics)
A Japan Foundation Selection
A publishing phenomenon in Japan--and a heartwarming story that will change the way we all see math, baseball, memory, and each other She is a housekeeper by trade, a single mom by choice, shy, brilliant, and starting a new tour of duty in the home of an aging professor. He is the professor, a mathematical genius, capable of limitless kindness and intuitive affection, but the victim of a mysterious accident that has rendered him unable to remember anything for longer than eighty minutes. Root, the housekeeper's ten-year-old son, combines his mother's sympathy with a sensitive curiosity all his own. Over the course of a few months in 1992, these three develop a profoundly affecting friendship, based on a shared love of mathematics and baseball, that will change each of their lives permanently. Chosen as the most popular book in Japan by readers and booksellers alike, The Gift of Numbers is Yoko Ogawa's first novel to be published in English, and in the U.S.
About the Author
Yoko Ogawa was born in 1962 in Okayama Prefecture, Japan, and lives in Ashiya, Japan, with her husband and son. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her short story "A Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain" appeared in The New Yorker in 2004.
