If you like to think deeply, this is definitely the novel for you.
It also left me feeling a bit sad and strangely optimistic at the same time too. Equally the same moment in time may have no consequences if influenced by a different set of circumstances. The novel left me with a heightened sense of the here and now, as each person's individual destiny can be altered, in a single moment, that's all it takes to destroy lives. You can't help but share in Ruth's determination to find out what has happened to Nao and her family. The character of Nao comes alive through the reading of her diary, drawing you into her world, were the brutality of some of the things she has to endure is counterbalanced by the spiritual guidance and love she receives from Old Jiko, her great grandmother. For me it ticked all of the boxes, it is beautifully written. It is the first time that I have awarded a book five stars. I think this is a remarkable novel, well deserved to be shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2013. 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.įull 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. 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. A diary is Nao’s only solace-and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine.
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. In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying.
“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.” A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptinessįinalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award
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