Awards

• Long-listed for Women's Prize for Fiction 2022
• Short-listed for Women's Prize for Fiction 2022
• Winner of Women's Prize for Fiction 2022 (UK)

Overview

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022 When a book and a reader are meant for each other, both of them know it . . . After the tragic death of his father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house and sound variously pleasant, angry or sad. Then his mother develops a hoarding problem, and the voices grow more clamorous. So Benny seeks refuge in the silence of a large public library. There he meets a mesmerising street artist with a smug pet ferret; a homeless philosopher-poet; and his very own Book, who narrates Benny's life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter. Blending unforgettable characters with jazz, climate change and our attachment to material possessions, this is classic Ruth Ozeki - bold, humane and heartbreaking.

Full Product Details

9781838855277

Table of Contents

Reviews

This compassionate novel of life, love and loss glows in the dark. Its strange, beautiful pages turn themselves. If you've lost your way with fiction over the last year or two, let The Book of Form and Emptiness light your way home -- DAVID MITCHELL This is both an extremely vivid picture of a small family enduring unimaginable loss, and a very powerful meditation on the way books can contain the chaos of the world and give it meaning and order. Annabelle and Benny Oh try to stay afloat in a sea of things, news, substances, technological soullessness and psychiatric quagmires, and the way they learn to live and breathe and even swim through it all feels like the struggle we all face. The Book of Form and Emptiness builds on the themes of A Tale for the Time Being, and ratifies Ozeki as one of our era's most compassionate and original minds -- DAVE EGGERS Once again, Ozeki has created a masterpiece. Her generous heart, remarkable imagination and brilliant mind light up every page -- KAREN JOY FOWLER Heart-breaking and heart-healing - a book to not only keep us absorbed but also to help us think and love and live and listen. No one writes quite like Ruth Ozeki and The Book of Form and Emptiness is a triumph -- MATT HAIG Ozeki's prose is warm and welcoming, but as you turn the pages you'll see that she carries her pen to dark places. Her characters ask What is a self, what should we hold onto, what to do when the whole world hurts? And yet even in this darkness, she finds hope. Ozeki reminds me of a literary bower bird, taking interesting things from across traditions and continents, all to make this intricate nest for us, her readers -- ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN Ozeki has done it again. This time she crosses into new dimensions, breathing life into pages, enticing us into an intimate world. Richly imagined, gorgeously executed, The Book of Form and Emptiness is a remarkable book -- DAVID EAGLEMAN A shimmeringly sad tale of a widowed mother and her heartbroken son, whose grief has built him an ear sharpened to the clamour and suffering of his object-filled world. This novel asks the reader to hold this mother-son pair very close, in radical intimacy, questioning what happens when we unbind the stories and labels that form and empty us, that make us familiar but also strange to one another. I am a deep fan of Ozeki's wild, unbridled brain and I adored this profound book which, itself, felt like a gloriously vibrant thing -- KYO MACLEAR [Ozeki] writes with bountiful insight, exuberant imagination and levitating grace . . . Most inventively, Ozeki celebrates the profound relationship between reader and writer. This enthralling, poignant, funny and mysterious saga, thrumming with grief and tenderness, beauty and compassion, offers much wisdom * * Booklist (starred review) * * Illuminating . . . Ozeki playfully and successfully breaks the fourth wall . . . and she cultivates a striking blend of young adult fiction tropes with complex references to Walter Benjamin, Zen Buddhism and Marxist philosophy. This is the rare work that will entertain teenagers, literary fiction readers and academics alike * * Publishers Weekly * * Praise for A Tale for the Time Being: This is one of the most deeply moving and thought-provoking novels I have read in a long time. In precise and luminous prose, Ozeki captures both the sweep and detail of our shared humanity, moving seamlessly between Nao's story and our own -- MADELINE MILLER

This compassionate novel of life, love and loss glows in the dark. Its strange, beautiful pages turn themselves. If you've lost your way with fiction over the last year or two, let The Book of Form and Emptiness light your way home -- DAVID MITCHELL This is both an extremely vivid picture of a small family enduring unimaginable loss, and a very powerful meditation on the way books can contain the chaos of the world and give it meaning and order. Annabelle and Benny Oh try to stay afloat in a sea of things, news, substances, technological soullessness and psychiatric quagmires, and the way they learn to live and breathe and even swim through it all feels like the struggle we all face. The Book of Form and Emptiness builds on the themes of A Tale for the Time Being, and ratifies Ozeki as one of our era's most compassionate and original minds -- DAVE EGGERS Once again, Ozeki has created a masterpiece. Her generous heart, remarkable imagination and brilliant mind light up every page -- KAREN JOY FOWLER Heart-breaking and heart-healing - a book to not only keep us absorbed but also to help us think and love and live and listen. No one writes quite like Ruth Ozeki and The Book of Form and Emptiness is a triumph -- MATT HAIG Ozeki's prose is warm and welcoming, but as you turn the pages you'll see that she carries her pen to dark places. Her characters ask What is a self, what should we hold onto, what to do when the whole world hurts? And yet even in this darkness, she finds hope. Ozeki reminds me of a literary bower bird, taking interesting things from across traditions and continents, all to make this intricate nest for us, her readers -- ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN Ozeki has done it again. This time she crosses into new dimensions, breathing life into pages, enticing us into an intimate world. Richly imagined, gorgeously executed, The Book of Form and Emptiness is a remarkable book -- DAVID EAGLEMAN A shimmeringly sad tale of a widowed mother and her heartbroken son, whose grief has built him an ear sharpened to the clamour and suffering of his object-filled world. This novel asks the reader to hold this mother-son pair very close, in radical intimacy, questioning what happens when we unbind the stories and labels that form and empty us, that make us familiar but also strange to one another. I am a deep fan of Ozeki's wild, unbridled brain and I adored this profound book which, itself, felt like a gloriously vibrant thing -- KYO MACLEAR Praise for A Tale for the Time Being: This is one of the most deeply moving and thought-provoking novels I have read in a long time. In precise and luminous prose, Ozeki captures both the sweep and detail of our shared humanity, moving seamlessly between Nao's story and our own -- MADELINE MILLER A triumph . . . Ozeki explores what it means to be human in this moment, right now (Nao). Her novel is saturated with love, ideas and compassion. In short, an absolute treat * * Sunday Times * * A Tale for the Time Being is a timeless story. Ruth Ozeki beautifully renders not only the devastation of the collision between man and the natural world, but also the often miraculous results of it. She is a deeply intelligent and humane writer who offers her insights with a grace that beguiles. I truly love this novel -- ALICE SEBOLD

This compassionate novel of life, love and loss glows in the dark. Its strange, beautiful pages turn themselves. If you've lost your way with fiction over the last year or two, let The Book of Form and Emptiness light your way home -- DAVID MITCHELL This is both an extremely vivid picture of a small family enduring unimaginable loss, and a very powerful meditation on the way books can contain the chaos of the world and give it meaning and order. Annabelle and Benny Oh try to stay afloat in a sea of things, news, substances, technological soullessness and psychiatric quagmires, and the way they learn to live and breathe and even swim through it all feels like the struggle we all face. The Book of Form and Emptiness builds on the themes of A Tale for the Time Being, and ratifies Ozeki as one of our era's most compassionate and original minds -- DAVE EGGERS Once again, Ozeki has created a masterpiece. Her generous heart, remarkable imagination and brilliant mind light up every page -- KAREN JOY FOWLER Heart-breaking and heart-healing - a book to not only keep us absorbed but also to help us think and love and live and listen. No one writes quite like Ruth Ozeki and The Book of Form and Emptiness is a triumph -- MATT HAIG Storytelling rarely comes more capacious than Ruth Ozeki's latest novel . . . Ozeki interconnects zen philosophy, the environmental crisis, a critique of our mass consumer lifestyle and a playful post-modern sensibility - one of the characters is a talking book - within a novel that, for all its wide-ranging intellectual restlessness, remains grounded in its characters' emotional reality * * Daily Mail * * Ozeki's prose is warm and welcoming, but as you turn the pages you'll see that she carries her pen to dark places. Her characters ask What is a self, what should we hold onto, what to do when the whole world hurts? And yet even in this darkness, she finds hope. Ozeki reminds me of a literary bower bird, taking interesting things from across traditions and continents, all to make this intricate nest for us, her readers -- ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN Ozeki is a skilled storyteller and the journey she takes us on is deadpan hilarious, heart-touching and ultimately hopeful * * Spectator * * Ozeki is an intelligent and talented writer, capable of presenting us with good scenes and genuine emotions * * Scotsman * * A vivid story of fraught adolescence, big ideas and humanity's tenuous hold on a suffering planet . . . Ozeki, an imaginative writer with a subversive sense of humour, has an acute grasp of young people's contemporary dilemmas . . . She doesn't offer anything as complete as salvation but something more real: a profound understanding of the human condition and a gift for turning it into literature * * Los Angeles Times * * Ozeki has done it again. This time she crosses into new dimensions, breathing life into pages, enticing us into an intimate world. Richly imagined, gorgeously executed, The Book of Form and Emptiness is a remarkable book -- DAVID EAGLEMAN

Author Information

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the author of four novels including The Book of Form and Emptiness, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction, and A Tale for the Time Being, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and translated into 28 languages. Ozeki has also written a short memoir, Timecode of a Face. She is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she teaches creative writing at Smith College and is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities. ruthozeki.com

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available