' A Tale for the Time Being is a timeless story. 'An extraordinary novel about a courageous young woman, riven by loneliness, by time, and (ultimately) by tsunami. Nao is an inspired narrator and her quest to tell her great grandmother's story, to connect with her past and with the larger world is both aching and true. Ozeki is one of my favorite novelists and here she is at her absolute best- bewitching, intelligent, hilarious, and heartbreaking, often on the same page.' - Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of This Is How You Lose Her A highly unusual and rewarding novel that covers a vast scope of often disturbing subjects with great humanity and continually loops back to the ever human dilemma of how to live through difficult times.' - The Bookseller

This tale from Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest, is sure to please anyone who values a good story broadened with intellectual vigor.' - Publishers Weekly 'Ozeki's absorbing novel is an extended meditation on writing, time, and people in time. A masterpiece, pure and simple.' - Kirkus The novel's seamless web of language, metaphor, and meaning can't be disentangled from its powerful emotional impact: These are characters we care for deeply, imparting vital life lessons through the magic of storytelling. 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.įull 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. A diary is Nao's only solace - and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.Īcross 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. 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. In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. '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, and long-awaited novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki

A tale for the time being by ruth ozeki