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.

NUBClub eventually discovered a trend in many of the books we read -- a strong beginning that lead to a completely disappointing end. A Tale of the Time Being was probably the first book that showed us this. Ozeki's core story about Nao's journey from her alienation from her surrounding and her family is convincing and moving. Nao is a terrific protagonist, and it was easy for us to identify with her struggles. We felt a lot of connection with Nao's depression and recovery through her connection with her grandmother's diary, and Ozeki creates a very believable journey in her recovery. If the book remained a story about a young woman finding a way out of her diasporic life and problems with her father in a connection with her past, it would have been a well-written and moving tale. But Ozeki ties it together with a time travel now that's oddly self-referential, tying together multiple characters in an explanation of Nao's grandmother that feels not only tacked on, but actually undermining of the emotional journey Ozeki spend the rest of the book building. We all agreed that the novel would have been much stronger if Ozeki didn't feel the need to tie all the elements together so tightly and just left the connections unexplained. A Tale for a Time Being is a good novel, but the end simply doesn't live up the poignant journey that Ozeki sets up through the rest of the work.