A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki shortlisted 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.

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