The Typing Lady

A spellbinding story collection about the lives we almost lived, the people we can’t quite forget, and the stories that shape us.

A college student falls for her professor and learns to transmute longing into language. A disquieted husband watches with tenderness and unease as the ghost of his wife’s ambition roams the woods outside their home. A long-deceased Beat poet hijacks the mind of a young publishing assistant during a sales meeting, railing against the state of modern literature. A curious grandmother creates a fake online dating profile to spy on her granddaughter’s romantic life—and sets in motion a deception she can’t control.

Spanning eras and geographies, The Typing Lady is an electrifying meditation on the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we become.

Ruth Ozeki was born and raised in Connecticut by an American father and a Japanese mother. She is a novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest whose books have garnered international acclaim. Her first two novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), have been translated into eleven languages and published in fourteen countries. Her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being (2013), won the LA Times Book Prize, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has been published in over thirty countries.

'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 on The Book of Form and Emptiness

'No one writes quite like Ruth Ozeki and The Book of Form and Emptiness is a triumph.’ Matt Haig on The Book of Form and Emptiness