num_pages: 208
description: Winner of the Yomiuri Literature PrizeWinner of the Honya Taisho (The Booksellers Prize)Winner of the Sugaku Shuppan-Sho (from the Japanese Academy of Mathematics)A Japan Foundation SelectionA publishing phenomenon in Japan--and a heartwarming story that will change the way we all see math, baseball, memory, and each other She is a housekeeper by trade, a single mom by choice, shy, brilliant, and starting a new tour of duty in the home of an aging professor. He is the professor, a mathematical genius, capable of limitless kindness and intuitive affection, but the victim of a mysterious accident that has rendered him unable to remember anything for longer than eighty minutes. Root, the housekeeper's ten-year-old son, combines his mother's sympathy with a sensitive curiosity all his own. Over the course of a few months in 1992, these three develop a profoundly affecting friendship, based on a shared love of mathematics and baseball, that will change each of their lives permanently. Chosen as the most popular book in Japan by readers and booksellers alike, The Gift of Numbers is Yoko Ogawa's first novel to be published in English, and in the U.S.
language: English
title: The Gift of Numbers
titlecomplete: The Gift of Numbers
characters: The Professor, Root, The Housekeeper
genres: Asia, Japanese Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, Asian Literature, Japan, Adult, Mathematics, Fiction, Contemporary
ratings_count: 68587
places: Japan, Hiroshima
awards: awardedAt: 1262332800000
name: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
category: Longlist, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Yomiuri Prize 読売文学賞
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: 本屋大賞
publisher: Picador USA