Emma recommends... The Typing Lady and Other Fictions - Ruth Ozeki

Emma says... All of Ozeki's writing is shot through with an unrivalled balance of wit and compassion, humour and gravity, and The Typing Lady - her first short story collection, published at the age of 70! - is no exception. Moving seamlessly between the personal and the political, the factual and the fictional, these stories are engaging, poignant, and funny, packed with a gentle beauty contrasted with a sharp wit few can rival. I swear at one point I felt Ozeki wink at me as I read. Pure joy.

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Exploring childhood ambition, youthful desire, midlife reinvention and the unsparing clarity of old age, Ozeki brings us eleven richly imagined stories of characters standing at life's thresholds.

A college student falls for her professor and learns to transmute longing into language. A disquieted husband watches as the ghost of his wife's ambition roams the woods outside their home. A long-deceased Beat poet hijacks the mind of a young publishing assistant and rails against the state of modern literature. A curious grandmother creates a fake online dating profile to spy on her granddaughter's romantic life - and sets in motion a deception she can't control.

Spanning eras and geographies, The Typing Lady is an electrifying meditation on the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we abandon and the stories we become. Threaded with the tactile ephemera of writing - typewriters, letters, manuscripts and disappearing ink - the book reveals how we record ourselves in language, and how language, over time, records us in return.