<p><b>Yoko Ogawa&apos;s <i>The Housekeeper and the Professor</i> is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.</b><br /><br /> 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. <br /><br />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&apos;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&apos;s shoe size—and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.</p>