Mina's Matchbox: A Novel

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Synopsis
From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police, a hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them.&“A story of first enchantments and last gasps…Effervescent." —New York Times Book Review&“Yoko Ogawa is a quiet wizard, casting her words like a spell, conjuring a world of curiosity and enchantment, secrets and loss. I read Mina&’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.&” —Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and EmptinessIn the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt&’s family. Tomoko&’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family&’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko&’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the family&’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko&’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko&’s life. Behind the family's sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand—her uncle&’s mysterious absences, her great-aunt&’s experience of the Second World War, her aunt&’s misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina&’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.
Copyright:
2024

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9780593316092
Related ISBNs:
9780593316085
Publisher:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Stephen Snyder
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Literature and Fiction, Parenting and Family
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.
Translator:
Stephen B. Snyder

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