by The Booker Tea

A Tale for the Time Being

Beautifully renders not only the devastation of the collision between man and the natural world, but also the often miraculous results of it. – Alice Sebold

by Ruth Ozeki

  • Paperback: 420 pages
  • Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd. (March 11, 2013)
  • ISBN-10: 0857867970
  • ISBN-13: 978-0857867971

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 will touch lives in a 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 humour 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 OzekiRuth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. Her first two novels, My Year of Meats(1998) and All Over Creation (2003), have been translated into 11 languages and published in over 30 countries. A Tale for the Time-Being (2013), her most recent work, won the LA Times Book Prize, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Her work of personal non-fiction, The Face: A Time Code (2016), was published by Restless Books as part of their groundbreaking series called The Face.

Ruth’s documentary and dramatic independent films, including Halving the Bones, have been shown on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and at colleges and universities across the country. She lives in British Columbia and New York City, and is currently the Elizabeth Drew Professor of Creative Writing at Smith College. [Image and text credit to Ruth Ozeki]