The release date for the English version of 'The Housekeeper and the Professor' by
Yōko Ogawa is Feb 2009. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
This great math professor has a strange issue: he only has eighty minutes of short-term memory left over after a terrible brain injury.
She is a smart young housekeeper who is employed to look after her ten-year-old kid.
And when the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another each morning, an odd but lovely bond develops between them. Even though the Professor's brain erases itself every eighty minutes, he is incapable of holding onto memories for very long, but his mind is still alive with sophisticated calculations from the past. Furthermore, the Housekeeper and her small boy are shown a lyrical and protective environment by the numbers in their whole well-chosen sequence. Even as his memory fades, the Professor can make links between the most basic of measurements—like the Housekeeper's shoe size—and the cosmos as a whole, bringing their lives increasingly closer and more deeply connected.
An intriguing tale about what it means to live in the present and the peculiar equations that may form a family is found in The Housekeeper and the Professor.