A Tale for the Time Being
“A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”
A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki — shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace — and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox —possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
“An exquisite novel: funny, tragic, hard-edged and ethereal at once.”
“Ozeki takes on big themes . . . drawn into the stories of two ‘time beings,’ Ruth and Nao, whose own fates are inextricably bound.”
“Ozeki’s profound affection for her characters makes A Tale for the Time Being as emotionally engaging as it is intellectually provocative.”
“As Ozeki explores the ties between reader and writer, she offers a lesson in redemption that reinforces the pricelessness of the here and now.”
Now available in paperback
At local bookstores and online retailers as an audiobook, ebook, hardcover, and now in paperback, too.
