The Typing Lady with Ruth Ozeki
Mon 25 May 2026
6:00pm at Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, 14-15 John St, Bath, BA1 2JL
All tickets include 15% off any books purchased on the night, a glass of wine or soft drink, author talk, Q&A and signing.
Other ways to book:
Email books@mrbsemporium.com, call 01225 331155 or pop into the shop at 14-15 John Street, Bath. BA1 2JL.
We are thrilled to welcome Booker Prize finalist, and winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Ruth Ozeki, back to Mr B’s for her new book, The Typing Lady.
Ruth Ozeki has been a Mr B’s team favourite for well over a decade now, with A Tale for the Time Being holding a firm place in the Mr B’s Hall of Fame. We’ve had the enormous pleasure of hosting Ruth several times previously so it’s a delight to welcome her back to Bath as we celebrate the release of her first short story collection, The Typing Lady. Here Ruth explores the lives we almost lived, the people we can’t quite forget and the stories that shape us long after the last page is turned.
Ruth will be in conversation with Sarah Crown, director of Literature at the Arts Council and former Guardian books editor.
**Please note this event has a start time of 6pm**
Can’t make it to the event? Order a signed and dedicated copy here.
About the book:
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.
About the author:
Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the author of four novels including The Book of Form and Emptiness, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and A Tale for the Time Being, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and translated into 28 languages. Her nonfiction work includes the short memoir, Timecode of a Face, and the documentary film Halving the Bones. She is affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation and lives in Western Massachusetts, where she taught creative writing at Smith College and is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor Emerita of Humanities.
Praise for Ruth Ozeki:
“If you’ve lost your way with fiction over the last year or two, let The Book of Form and Emptiness light your way home” – David Mitchell
“No one writes quite like Ruth Ozeki” – Matt Haig
“Ozeki [is] one of our era’s most compassionate and original minds” – Dave Eggers