There, Benny discovers a strange new world. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous.Īt first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. The voices belong to the things in his house-a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. '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, Booker Prize-finalist author of Cloud AtlasĪ boy who hears the voices of objects all around him a mother drowning in her possessions and a Book that might hold the secret to saving them both-the brilliantly inventive new novel from the Booker Prize-finalist Ruth Ozeki 'Inventive, vivid, and propelled by a sense of wonder.' - TIME 'No one writes like Ruth Ozeki-a triumph.' -Matt Haig, New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library Fires rage as the redwoods burn and in the deep ocean, a pilot whale carries her dead baby on her nose, while sea turtles weep briny tears onto nets of plastic.Description Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction At the sound of a footstep, a young girl freezes, and Andromeda sparkles in the firmament. The plundered moon and all its craters globes and stars and asteroids a jet black crow with a diamond tiara a flock of rubber duckies, spinning through the Pacific gyres. Pyramids of sulfur, rising yellow in the mist. And, oh, the visions we had!Ĭontainer ships glittering on a moonlit night off the coast of Alaska.

Some of these sounds were so beautiful they made you laugh out loud and clap your hands with delight, and others were so sad they made tears run down your face. With your supernatural ears, you were able to perceive, with absolute clarity, the sinuous shapes and contours of the sounds that matter makes as it moves through space and time and mind. For the first time you could see the voices of the things you'd been hearing for so long, all that clamorous matter vying for your attention. “Do you remember our conversation? Do you remember the places we went and the things we saw? The bindery was our access, the point in space that contains all other points, and that night you were a boy unbound, a tiny astronaut, taking your first leap into an infinite and unknowable universe.

The book form of emptiness