Books by Ruth Ozeki
The Book of Form and Emptiness: A Novel
by Ruth Ozeki
🏆 Winner of the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction
“This book does two things really well. The first is shifting to the hallucinatory world to the context of loss and grief. Lots of people experience these sorts of things following the loss of a loved one, and that happens to Benny as well. Secondly, this is a book about books. It’s steeped in books, much of it unfolds in a library, and in a way it’s about how we create different worlds constantly. We can move between them, and they shape how we think. The boundaries between these fictional worlds and the real world is much more porous and malleable than we might appreciate.” Read more...
The best books on Hallucination
Ben Alderson-Day, Psychologist
“It’s brilliant. It’s a really amazing book, and it’s very feminine. It’s really how women experience meat as often the cook for the family, but also perhaps as the daughters and wives who are given meat, and it’s about what meat means to different cultures and how we try to sell one culture to the other. The central character is a Japanese-American woman making a documentary for the Japanese market about American meat. In Japan they haven’t got a history of eating a lot of red meat but the Americans were trying to sell it to them, so trying to change their culture. It makes you think about why we eat meat: a lot of it is because of cultural reasons. Think of the Sunday roast. We think we are more cosmopolitan now but even in Britain today, meat is for men, and in many places for a man to become vegetarian is seen as maybe a little bit effete. Isn’t that ridiculous?” Read more...
Louise Gray, Environmentalist
Interviews where books by Ruth Ozeki were recommended
The best books on Eating Meat, recommended by Louise Gray
What does it mean to be an ethical meat-eater? Author and journalist Louise Gray chooses five books that examine the impact of our omnivorous lifestyle, and explains why she spent a year only eating the animals she had killed herself.
Magical Realism Books, recommended by Five Books interviewees
If you enjoy some fantastical elements in your literature—but you aren’t quite ready for full-on swords and sorcery—then perhaps magical realism books are for you. As a genre, magical realism is often associated with South America, thanks in large part to the ‘father of magical realism’ Gabriel García Márquez and mega-bestselling books by Isabel Allende, but examples can be found from all over the world. We’ve put a list of must-read titles.
The best books on Hallucination, recommended by Ben Alderson-Day
Hallucinations can be strange, alarming, even sometimes exciting. They affect the mentally ill and the chemically altered, but also those suffering from migraine, Parkinson’s, and even grief. Researcher Ben Alderson-Day talks us through this odd phenomenon as he selects five of the best book on hallucination.
Award-Winning Novels of 2022, recommended by Cal Flyn
Any end-of-year list is necessarily partial; no one person could hope to read every novel published in the English language in any given year. That’s why prize lists are so useful for guiding the casual reader’s literary diet. Here, our deputy editor Cal Flyn offers a brief round-up of the books that ruled victorious during the 2022 awards season.
