The Housekeeper And The Professor [Paperback]

Yoko Ogawa'sThe Housekeeper and the Professoris an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problemever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeperwith a ten-year-old sonwho 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 quantitieslike the Housekeeper's shoe sizeand the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching. Paul Auster

Gorgeous, cinematic . . .The Housekeeper and the Professoris a perfectly sustained novel . . . like a note prolonged, a fermata, a pause enabling us to peer intently into the lives of its characters. . . . This novel has all the charm and restraint of any by Ishiguro or Kenzaburo Oe and the whimsy of Murakami. The three lives connect like the vertices of a triangle. Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Tilcr