A Tale for the Time Being

Category: Book
By (author): Ozeki, Ruth
Subject:  FICTION / Canadian
  FICTION / General
Awards: Man Booker International Prize (2013) Short-listed
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: December 2013
Format: Book-paperback
Pages: 432
Size: 8.24in x 5.24in x 1.13in
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Additional Notes

From The Publisher*On a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes up on the beach. Tucked inside is a collection of curious items, including the diary of a sixteenyear-old Japanese girl named Nao Yasutani. Ruth, who finds the lunchbox, suspects that it is debris from Japan's devastating 2011 tsunami. Once Ruth starts to read the diary, she quickly finds herself drawn into the mystery of the young girl's fate.

In a manga café in Tokyo's Electric Town, Nao has decided there's only one escape from the loneliness and pain of her life, as she's uprooted from her U.S. home, bullied at school, and watching her parents spiral deeper into disaster. But before she ends it all, she wants to accomplish one thing: to recount the story of her great-grandmother, a 104-year-old Zen Buddhist nun, in the pages of her diary. The diary, Nao's only solace, is her cry for help to a reader she can only imagine.

Full of Ozeki's signature humour and insight, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

Review Quote*"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
Biographical NoteRUTH OZEKI is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Shambhala Sun, and More, among other publications. In June 2010, she was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest and is affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. She lives in British Columbia and New York City.