Ruth Ozeki is an award-winning novelist and filmmaker. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being won the 2013 Independent Booksellers Book Award and the Kitchies Red Tentacle Award, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013 and the National Book Critics Award for Fiction. She is also the author of My Year of Meats and All Over Creation. Ozeki was born and raised in Connecticut, by an American father and Japanese mother. In June 2010 she was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest. She divides her time between British Columbia and New York.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, this is a timeless and compassionate novel about what it means to be human
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