The Book of Form and Emptiness
Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022
Ruth Ozeki
“When a book and a reader are meant for each other, both of them know it.”
Available as Paperback, Hardback, eBook, Downloadable audio
Winner of the Women’s Prize, this is a brilliantly inventive novel about loss, growing up and our relationship with things
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.
“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
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”The Book of Form and Emptiness is a big, polyphonic, often comic, magical-realist collage of a novel that attempts to interrogate the most pressing issues of the age … at its heart is a compelling story of human connection and the redemptive power of art … Ozeki is a talented storyteller”
guardian
“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
“There’s powerful magic here … Ozeki is unusually patient with her characters, even the rebarbative ones, and she is able to record the subtle peculiarities of other classes of beings that more overeager writers would probably miss … Ozeki gives us a metaphor for our very own American consumption disorder, our love-hate relationship with the stuff we produce and can’t let go of”
new York Times Book Review
“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
Ruth Ozeki
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
The Book of Form and Emptiness
‘What she is best at conveying, though, is the tidal flood of human life and the absurd, unwieldy scurf of manufactured objects that has accompanied it through the Anthropocene. You hang on to your things in case you’re swept away by the water and become like a thing yourself. What can be relinquished and what can’t?
At base, this is a simple story about the links between poverty, mental health and loss. It’s often heartbreaking, but we would be wrong to interpret Annabelle and Benny’s struggles as a descent. Ozeki is carefully celebrating difference, not patronising dysfunction. Out of their fractured relations, she makes something so satisfying that it gave me the sense of being addressed not by an author but by a world’
M. John Harrison
Guardian
Presenting: THE BOOK OF FORM & EMPTINESS The unforgettable new novel from @TheBookerPrizes-shortlisted author of A Tale For the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki (@ozekiland). Pre-order via your local bookshop, or online at linktr.ee/thebook
