The Housekeeper and the Professor

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.

“Ogawa weaves a poignant tale of beauty, heart and sorrow in her exquisite new novel.”

"A mysterious, suspenseful, and radiant fable."

"Narrator Cassandra Campbell's crisp diction and soft tones suit the precision of the book and the subtle but engaging personality of the housekeeper."

"Ogawa weaves a poignant tale of beauty, heart, and sorrow in her exquisite new novel."

Yoko 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.Original bio sent from Cassandra:Cassandra Campbell began doing voice overs as the voice for Calvin Klein's Italian commercials. This was followed by commercial and documentary recording in both English and Italian. She has recorded many audiobooks and has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards as well as an Audie(R) Award nomination. As an actress and director, she has worked at the Public, the Mint, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stagewest, Theatreworks, the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, Millmountain Theatre, the National Shakespeare Company, and the New York Fringe Festival.Stephen Snyder has translated works by Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, Miri Yu, and Kafu Nagai, among others. His translation of Natsuo Kirino's Out was nominated for an Edgar Award for best mystery novel. The Diving Pool, a translation of three novellas by Yoko Ogawa, was published by Picador. He teaches Japanese literature at Middlebury College.

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