About the Book
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 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 it 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 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.
About the Author :
Ruth Ozeki is a filmmaker and novelist who has won major awards in both fields. Her first novel, My Year of Meats, won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award, the Imus/Barnes & Noble American Book Award, and a Special Jury Prize of the World Cookbook Awards in Versailles. All Over Creation was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the American Book Award, as well as the 2004 WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction. Her award-winning novels have been described as witty, intelligent, and passionate by the Independent, and as possessing shrewd and playful humor, luscious sexiness, and kinetic pizzazz by the Chicago Tribune. She began her media career as an art director in film, switched to directing television documentaries, and then began making her own films, of which Body of Correspondence won the New Visions Award at the San Francisco Film Festival. A frequent speaker on college and university campuses, she serves on the advisory editorial board of the Asian American Literary Review.
Review :
"A Tale for the Time Being is a timeless story. Ruth Ozeki beautifully renders not only the devastation of the collision between man and the natural world but also the often miraculous results of it. She is a deeply intelligent and humane writer who offers her insights with a grace that beguiles. I truly love this novel."
-- "Alice Sebold, New York Times bestselling author "
"A Tale for the Time Being is equal parts mystery and meditation. The mystery is a compulsive, gritty page-turner. The meditation--on time and memory, on the oceanic movement of history, on impermanence and uncertainty, but also resilience and bravery--is deep and gorgeous and wise. A completely satisfying, continually surprising, wholly remarkable achievement, this is a book to be read and reread."
-- "Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author "
"A powerful yarn of fate and parallel lives."
-- "Good Housekeeping"
"A terrific novel full of breakthroughs both personal and literary...Nao's voice--funny, profane and deep--is stirring and unforgettable as she ponders the meaning of her life."
-- "Seattle Times"
"A wise and wonderfully inventive story that will resonate through time."
-- "Gail Tsukiyama, author of The Samurai's Garden"
"An intriguing, even beautiful narrative remarkable for its unusual but attentively structured plot...We go from one story line to the other, back and forth across the Pacific, but the reader never loses place or interest."
-- "Booklist (starred review)"
"As contemporary as a Japanese teenager's slang but as ageless as a Zen koan, Ruth Ozeki's new novel combines great storytelling with a probing investigation into the purpose of existence."
-- "Washington Post"
"As we read Nao's story and the story of Ozeki's reading of it, as we go back and forth between the text and the notes, time expands for us. It opens up onto something resembling narrative eternity...page after page, slowly unfolding. And what a beautiful effect that is for a novel to create."
-- "NPR's All Things Considered (audio review)"
"Delightful yet sometimes harrowing...Many of the elements of Nao's story--schoolgirl bullying, unemployed suicidal 'salarymen, ' kamikaze pilots--are among a Western reader's most familiar images of Japan, but in Nao's telling, refracted through Ruth's musings, they become fresh and immediate, occasionally searingly painful."
-- "New York Times Book Review"
"For Ruth, Ozeki's tone is slightly worried and obsessive as she reads the diary aloud to her husband. She lends a note of childishness and forced cheerfulness to Nao and her (literally) purple prose. The intoned prayers of gratitude from Nao's great-grandmother, a feminist Buddhist nun, are genius. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award."
-- "AudioFile"
"Forget the proverbial message in a bottle: This Tale fractures clichés as it affirms the lifesaving power of words...[and] reinforces the pricelessness of the here and now."
-- "Elle"
"If you found a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore, containing an old diary, would it change your life? The answer in Ozeki's tale is emphatically YES. There's much weirdness and wonder in store in this new novel from the author of My Year of Meats."
-- "BookPage"
"Ingenious and touching...I read it with great pleasure."
-- "Philip Pullman, award-winning author of The Golden Compass"
"Magnificent...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. A masterpiece, pure and simple."
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"
"Masterfully woven...Entwining Japanese language with WWII history, pop culture with Proust, Zen with quantum mechanics, Ozeki alternates between the voices of two women to produce a spellbinding tale."
-- "O, The Oprah Magazine"
"Nao's winsome voice contrasts with Ruth's intellectual ponderings to make up a lyrical disquisition on writing's power to transcend time and place."
-- "Publishers Weekly"
"Ozeki leaves us at a moment in time where, as in quantum physics, there are no absolutes in terms of past, present, and future. Just Nao. And that's such a pleasure."
-- "New York Daily News"
"Profoundly original, with authentic, touching characters and grand, encompassing themes, Ruth Ozeki's novel proves that truly great stories--like this one--can both deepen our understanding of self and remind us of our shared humanity."
-- "Deborah Harkness, New York Times bestselling author"
"Sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Nao Yasutani's voice is the heart and soul of this very satisfying book."
-- "USA Today"
"There is far too much to say about this remarkable and ambitious book in a few sentences. This is for real and not just another hyped-up blurb. A Tale for the Time Being is a great achievement, and it is the work of a writer at the height of her powers. Ruth Ozeki has not only reinvigorated the novel itself, the form, but she's given us the tried and true, deep, and essential pleasure of characters whom we love and who matter."
-- "Jane Hamilton, New York Times bestselling author "
