Mina's Matchbox

On sleepless nights, I open the matchbox and reread the story of the girl who gathered shooting stars After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life. While the 1970s transform Japan, her uncle''s magnificent colonial mansion is a place out of time; its sprawling gardens are even home to a pet pygmy hippo. Equally beguiling are Tomoko''s relatives, especially her cousin Mina. Their growing friendship draws her into an intoxicating world - one full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling. Rich with the magic and mystery of youth, Mina''s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time, and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse. ''Beguiling'' New Yorker ''Beautifully composed'' Financial Times ''Effervescent'' New York Times Book Review ''Transfixing'' Time ''I read Mina''s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end'' Ruth Ozeki

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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 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.?