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.
Winner of the UK Independent Bookseller Award and the LA Times Book Prize for Fiction, 2013. Nao lives in Tokyo. She is sixteen, and has decided to write a diary before she kills herself. She has plenty of material - school bullies, depressed parents - but she particularly wants to chronicle the life of her great-grandmother, Jiko, a Buddhist nun. And eventually, Nao thinks, her diary will find its reader. Ruth lives with her husband on the Pacific coast of Canada. A few months after the 2010 tsunami she finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore. It contains a diary... Ruth Ozeki was born and raised in Connecticut by an American father and a Japanese mother. She has lived in Japan, where among other things she worked as a bar hostess and studied flower arrangement, Noh drama and mask carving. Ruth practises Zen Buddhism and was ordained as a priest in 2010. She is the bestselling author of My Year of Meats and All Over Creation. 'A Tale for the Time Being is a timeless story. Ruth Ozeki beautifully renders not only the devastation of the collision between man and the natural world, but also the often miraculous results of it. She is a deeply intelligent and humane writer who offers her insight with a grace that beguiles. I truly love this novel.' Alice Sebold 'A Tale for the Time Being is an extraordinary novel about a courageous young woman, riven by loneliness, by Time and (ultimately) by Tsunami. Nao is an inspired narrator and her quest to tell her great grandmother's story, to connect with her past, with the world is both aching and true. Ozeki is one of my favorite novelists and here she is at her absolute best - bewitching intelligent hilarious and heartbreaking, often on the same page...A Tale for the Time Being is one of those novels that will renew your faith in literature.' Junot Diaz 'Ingenious and touching, A Tale for the Time Being is also highly readable. And interesting: the contrast of cultures is especially well done. I greatly look forward to Ruth Ozeki's next book.' Philip Pullman 'A Tale for the Time Being is equal parts mystery and meditation. The mystery is a compulsive, gritty page-turner. The meditation-on time and memory, on the oceanic movement of history, on impermanence and uncertainty, but also resilience and bravery-is deep and gorgeous and wise. A completely satisfying, continually surprising, wholly remarkable achievement, this is a book to be read and reread.' Karen Joy Fowler 'Ozeki's magnificent third novel (All Over Creation, 2003, etc.) brings together a Japanese girl's diary and a transplanted American novelist to meditate on everything from bullying to the nature of conscience and the meaning of life...The novel's seamless web of language, metaphor and meaning can't be disentangled from its powerful emotional impact: These are characters we care for deeply, imparting vital life lessons through the magic of storytelling. A masterpiece, pure and simple.' Kirkus Reviews 'A Tale for the Time Being achieves an impressive balancing act: it's a book that is profound but never earnest.' Weekend Australian
In the wake of the 2011 tsunami, Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home in British Columbia. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes, heartbreak and dreams of a young girl desperate for someone to understand her. Each turn of the page pulls Ruth deeper into the mystery of Nao’s life, and forever changes her in a way neither could foresee. Weaving across continents and decades, A Tale for the Time Being is an extraordinary novel about our shared humanity and the search for home.
A thrilling story by the legendary Diana Wynne Jones—with an introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin. London, 1939. Vivian Smith thinks she is being evacuated to the countryside, because of the war. But she is being kidnapped - out of her own time. Her kidnappers are Jonathan and Sam, two boys her own age, from a place called Time City, designed especially to oversee history. But now history is going critical, and Jonathan and Sam are convinced that Time City's impending doom can only be averted by a twentieth-century girl named Vivian Smith. Too bad they have the wrong girl. . . .
Edmund Lea perpetually rides a ghost train -- except every seven years on Christmas Eve, when he is allowed to revisit his home town. Like Wagner's Flying Dutchman, Edmund is condemned to eternity alone until he determines how to lift the curse upon him. Time passes, from 1970 to 2019, but Edmund remains seventeen, unable to age and watching the world grow older. He tries in vain to break the spell by way of true love, repentance, hedonism; he tries to change the world and he tries to die. Characters move in and out of Maxwell's story like Dante's figures in Hell, but Edmund's own Virgil is a careless and unhelpful poet, a portrait of the author as a student. The tale is told in formal terza rima, but its language and tone, its humor and sense of homesickness, are decidedly contemporary. It is a brilliant achievement.
According to the front-page photo in the (New York) Daily News, my father was "Murdered Gangland Style." I was three years old. The assassination was most likely ordered by a mob insurance broker in order to collect on a large life insurance policy that my father provided as collateral for a business loan. After my father's death, my distraught mother began a downward spiral into substance abuse from which she never recovered. The insurance broker, later convicted of another killing while under witness protection, was never charged with my father's murder. Based on those events, I've written a time-travel novel, "A Tale of Two Times," about how a middle-aged son battles to save his younger parents' previously doomed lives. In present-day Florida, Billy Volante leans against a large oak tree in his backyard, only to keep falling---through the tree -- into 1961, exactly fifty-six years into the past, into the same Gulf Coast resort town where he now resides and where his parents took winter vacations. Billy and his free-spirited girlfriend, Carrie Anne, decide to pose as a married couple to warn his young father, Johnny Volante, of the looming 1964 murder. Seeking to build a friendship before revealing his identity, the older Billy takes his father on a fishing trip, only to stumble upon a vacationing mob attorney, Herman Goldman, who will order the future murder. When Goldman meets Billy, things change. Will Johnny Volante believe Billy, a man more than twice his age, is his son? If Billy saves his father's life, what becomes of his future and the future of the girl he loves? Will Goldman complicate things, even more, by adding another target to Billy's lifesaving mission? Obviously, there's only one way to find out!
This #1 New York Times bestseller is the first book in a new series set in Chris Colfer's Land of Stories universe, perfect for both new and longtime fans! When Brystal Evergreen stumbles across a secret section of the library, she discovers a book that introduces her to a world beyond her imagination and learns the impossible: She is a fairy capable of magic! But in the oppressive Southern Kingdom, women are forbidden from reading and magic is outlawed, so Brystal is swiftly convicted of her crimes and sent to the miserable Bootstrap Correctional Facility. But with the help of the mysterious Madame Weatherberry, Brystal is whisked away and enrolled in an academy of magic! Adventure comes with a price, however, and when Madame Weatherberry is called away to attend to an important problem she doesn't return. Do Brystal and her classmates have what it takes to stop a sinister plot that risks the fate of the world, and magic, forever? Fall in love with an all-new series from Chris Colfer, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Land of Stories, filled with adventure, imagination, and wonderfully memorable characters both familiar and new. A #1 New York Times bestsellerAn IndieBound bestseller A USA Today bestseller A Wall Street Journal bestseller Don't miss: A TALE OF WITCHCRAFT...
In this mischievous and utterly original debut, Hansel and Gretel walk out of their own story and into eight other classic Grimm-inspired tales. As readers follow the siblings through a forest brimming with menacing foes, they learn the true story behind (and beyond) the bread crumbs, edible houses, and outwitted witches. Fairy tales have never been more irreverent or subversive as Hansel and Gretel learn to take charge of their destinies and become the clever architects of their own happily ever after.
