“I’d be doing something around the house, folding laundry or whatever, and I would hear him clear his throat and then he would say my name. For a year afterwards, Ozeki would hear him speaking to her. The book took eight years to write - “every novel takes me longer - this is not a good trend” - but its roots go back to the death of her own father in 1998. The Book Of Form And Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki. “Can objects teach us about reality?” she asks. The question “do insentient beings speak the dharma?”, taken from a Zen parable, is at the heart of this latest novel. Her later novels, A Tale for the Time Being, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013, and The Book of Form and Emptiness are explicitly Her first two novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), which she describes as “a deep-dive into potatoes”, grew out of her concerns about climate change and industrial agriculture (her father’s family were farmers in Wisconsin). And it is true that this tale of a mother and son finding their voices and a way out of the mess of their lives is both deeply affecting and uplifting.Ī passionate environmentalist and feminist, Ozeki grew up reading Rachel Carson and imbibing the political consciousness of the 1970s, she says. However, as with all Ozeki’s novels, The Book of Form and Emptiness doesn’t shy away from all-too-real issues - global waring, consumerism, mental illness - or asking the big questions: what is real? Is there a limit to human desires for more? And yet the chair of the Women’s prize described it as a complete joy and critics have been drawn to her “calm, dry, methodical good humour”. Philosophically serious and formally playful (the book itself is talking to us), this cacophonous novel sometimes seems as crowded and whimsical as Annabelle’s eclectic collections.

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