A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel [B0120]

2013 PB in excellent condition. A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness Finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award "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.

From Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "A poignant, powerful story that dissects culture, history, language, and the erosion of information, Ruth Ozeki is truly a one of a kind writer and deserves every accolade that comes to her."; "Interesting. Thoughtful. Philosophical. Cerebral. Weird. In four words...my kind of tale!!"; "This novel works great only because the author managed to create an engaging character out of a bullied teenage girl."; "- such a devastatingly good book. my first delving into metafictional works was a good one, one that made me question what exactly was real and what was fictional."