A brilliant, unforgettable, and long-awaited novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki
“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.”
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.
