The Book of Form and Emptiness

A year after his father Kenji is killed in the road outside a chicken processing plant, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. Not people: things. A pair of scissors, a broken window, the sneakers under his bed, all of them speaking in tones that range from plaintive to furious, and none of them willing to stop. His mother Annabelle, working a job clipping news stories from a shrinking industry and grieving in the only way available to her, has started to fill the house with objects she cannot bear to throw away, so the noise is not going to lessen. Benny is medicated, hospitalised, released, and eventually finds refuge in the public library, where the shelves are quiet and where he meets a homeless philosopher-poet who calls himself the Bottleman and a girl who reads aloud and steals. He also meets his own Book, which narrates his life to him and argues with him about how it should be told. Ozeki writes with great tenderness about hoarding, poverty and psychiatric care without turning any of them into metaphor, and her Zen inheritance runs underneath the whole thing: an insistence that objects and people are made of one another, and that the way out of suffering is attention.