This compassionate novel of life, love and loss glows in the dark. Its strange, beautiful pages turn themselves. 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
This is both an extremely vivid picture of a small family enduring unimaginable loss, and a very powerful meditation on the way books can contain the chaos of the world and give it meaning and order. Annabelle and Benny Oh try to stay afloat in a sea of things, news, substances, technological soullessness and psychiatric quagmires, and the way they learn to live and breathe and even swim through it all feels like the struggle we all face. The Book of Form and Emptiness builds on the themes of A Tale for the Time Being, and ratifies Ozeki as one of our era's most compassionate and original minds -- DAVE EGGERS
Once again, Ozeki has created a masterpiece. Her generous heart, remarkable imagination and brilliant mind light up every page -- KAREN JOY FOWLER
Heart-breaking and heart-healing - a book to not only keep us absorbed but also to help us think and love and live and listen. No one writes quite like Ruth Ozeki and The Book of Form and Emptiness is a triumph -- MATT HAIG
Ozeki's prose is warm and welcoming, but as you turn the pages you'll see that she carries her pen to dark places. Her characters ask What is a self, what should we hold onto, what to do when the whole world hurts? And yet even in this darkness, she finds hope. Ozeki reminds me of a literary bower bird, taking interesting things from across traditions and continents, all to make this intricate nest for us, her readers -- ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN
Ozeki has done it again. This time she crosses into new dimensions, breathing life into pages, enticing us into an intimate world. Richly imagined, gorgeously executed, The Book of Form and Emptiness is a remarkable book -- DAVID EAGLEMAN
A shimmeringly sad tale of a widowed mother and her heartbroken son, whose grief has built him an ear sharpened to the clamour and suffering of his object-filled world. This novel asks the reader to hold this mother-son pair very close, in radical intimacy, questioning what happens when we unbind the stories and labels that form and empty us, that make us familiar but also strange to one another. I am a deep fan of Ozeki's wild, unbridled brain and I adored this profound book which, itself, felt like a gloriously vibrant thing -- KYO MACLEAR
[Ozeki] writes with bountiful insight, exuberant imagination and levitating grace . . . Most inventively, Ozeki celebrates the profound relationship between reader and writer. This enthralling, poignant, funny and mysterious saga, thrumming with grief and tenderness, beauty and compassion, offers much wisdom * * Booklist (starred review) * *
Illuminating . . . Ozeki playfully and successfully breaks the fourth wall . . . and she cultivates a striking blend of young adult fiction tropes with complex references to Walter Benjamin, Zen Buddhism and Marxist philosophy. This is the rare work that will entertain teenagers, literary fiction readers and academics alike * * Publishers Weekly * *
Storytelling rarely comes more capacious than Ruth Ozeki's latest novel . . . Ozeki interconnects zen philosophy, the environmental crisis, a critique of our mass consumer lifestyle and a playful post-modern sensibility - one of the characters is a talking book - within a novel that, for all its wide-ranging intellectual restlessness, remains grounded in its characters' emotional reality * * Daily Mail * *
