I remember being quite wowed after first reading this novel. I got this copy on publication and have not read it since. I think it may be time for a reread, because for me it was definitely a five star read. This is a first edition, first print, published by Viking in 2013. It is signed and dated on the first page by Ozeki.
The front cover has a strong Japanese Style to it in pale washed out water colour. The back cover is all blue and features praise and comments from other authors.
Here is the synopsis -
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.