A Tale for the Time Being
A Novel
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Publisher Description
A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness
Finalist 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A Japanese teenager named Nao sits in a Tokyo cafe writing in her journal about the merciless teasing she endures at school, her nuclear family’s unravelling—and the life story of her 104-year-old grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s her only ally. While out for a stroll, Ruth, a novelist living on an isolated island off Canada’s British Columbia coast, stumbles across a barnacle-encrusted bag containing Nao’s diary. Ruth Ozeki, the fantastically creative author of My Year of Meats, has penned another alluring and intelligent novel constructed with the wondrous precision of wooden nesting dolls. As it alternates between the voices of two women from very different worlds, A Tale for the Time Being tells a spellbinding story about the anguish of losing the things that matter most and the comfort of human connection.
