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Mina's Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa
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Mina's Matchbox

A tale of friendship and family secrets in 1970s Japan from the International Booker Prize nominated author
Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Translator Stephen Snyder
Length TBA
Language English
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Brought to you by Penguin.

After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent by her mother to live for a year with her aunt and uncle. It is a year which will change her life.

The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle's big colonial mansion hides many secrets. It also has an unusual occupant in Pochiko, a Pygmy hippopotamus who is the last survivor from a time when the extensive gardens housed a zoo. But it is Tomoko's growing friendship with her cousin Mina which has the most profound effect on her time with the family.

As the two girls share confidences and enthusiasms, encounter heartache and have their eyes opened to the workings of the adult world, they build an enduring bond which will change both of them.

©2024 Yoko Ogawa (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Yoko Ogawa (Author)
Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her works include The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge. Her most recent novel, The Memory Police, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Stephen Snyder (Translator)
Stephen Snyder is a translator and professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA.

He has translated works by Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu, among others. His translation of Natsuo Kirino’s Out was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 2004, and his translation of Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011.?

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Reviews

One of Japan’s most acclaimed authors A conspicuously gifted writer…To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state... She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance' A masterpiece...a novel that makes us see differently Strange, beautiful and affecting 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. Expand reviews