Uzès Book Club

Tuesday 17 February, 3:00pm
At a Member’s home the third Tuesday of the Month

In February, we will be discussing the Japnese novel ‘The Housekeeper and the Professor’ by Yoka Ogawa.  An enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.  He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem – ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eightly minutes of short-term memory.  She is an astute young Hosekeeper – with a ten year old son – who is hired to care for the Professor.  And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.  Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes) the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past.  And the numbers, in all their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son.  The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest quantities – like the Housekeeper’s shoe size – and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Book Club has a waiting list at the moment but we are happy to share our 2026 book list (created via a member poll) if anyone is looking for new reading ideas.  Please contact us if you are interested in being added to the waiting list or receiving our book choices.

Christine Frati                                              Angela Denton-Thompson