-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan's bestselling and most celebrated authors
From Akutagawa Award-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may contain a hairline crack of cruel intent.
A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool--a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life.
A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that may or may not be a hallucination--but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister's?
A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg.
Hauntingly spare, beautiful, and twisted, The Diving Pool is a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection of novellas about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities.
"Starred Review. The surreal plotlines of the three pieces interact brilliantly, underscoring the utter desperation to which extreme loneliness can lead." - Kirkus Reviews.
"There's nothing magical about these calmly realistic first-person narratives, yet at times each is as spine-tingling as a Stephen King creep show." - Booklist.
"Ogawa’s tales possess a gnawing, erotic edge." - Publishers Weekly.
This information about The Diving Pool was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: © Tadashi Okochi
Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her works include The Memory Police, The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas; The Housekeeper and the Professor; Hotel Iris; and Revenge. She lives in Ashiya, Japan.
Name Pronunciation
Yoko Ogawa: o-GAR-wa
If you liked The Diving Pool, try these:
by Jason Webster
Published 2012
An accomplished debut mystery set in the high-stakes and decidedly murky world of bullfighting in Valencia, Spain
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
Published 2009
A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story and financial intrigue.
In war there are no unwounded soldiers
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
