A pale pink membrane of delicate muscle tissue surrounded it. 'Sewing for the Heart' is an intricate character study examining the life of a bag maker commissioned by a woman whose vulnerable heart rests outside her chest: 'It could fit in the palm of my hand. Later, the handless body of her ex-husband also turns up in the soil. J,' a struggling novelist recalls the antics of her next-door neighbor, who discovers 'a carrot in the shape of a hand' in her garden. A jigsaw pleasure comes from anecdotes and details slipping into place between most stories, deepening characters and thematic resonance. Weaving together the morbid tales of 11 unnamed narrators, prolific Japanese author Ogawa (Hotel Iris), a Shirley Jackson Award winner, presents an intense rumination on the precariousness of interconnected lives. These are delectably fantastic, endlessly intriguing tales of obsession, revenge, and unforeseen interconnections.-Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Anger, mayhem, and murder are in the air, yet Ogawa lulls us with psychological tenderness and evocative details until the macabre bursts forth full strength. A man who makes custom handbags slips into madness after taking on a bizarre commission. A young writer is startled when her strange landlady presents her with a hand-shaped carrot. A schoolgirl whose mother is dying meets her father, a relatively well-known politician, for the first time, then breaks into an abandoned post office that is filled with kiwis. Later we learn who was crying in the backroom and why. Things start out gently, if spookily, with a grief-addled woman waiting to be served in a bakery. He won the Shirley Jackson Award for The Diving Pool (2008) and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize for Hotel Iris (2010), and Ogawa is just as imaginative, seductive, and disconcerting in this piquant sequence of 11 dark tales chained together in unexpected ways. Praise for Ogawa's fine-spun and unnerving fiction continues to escalate.

Yōko ogawa revenge eleven dark tales