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.

• We started tracking this book on March 1, 2013.
• This book was $14.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 186 times in the past 4,342 days.
• The current price of this book is $9.99 last checked 3 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past 90 days.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $2.99.
• The lowest price to date was $1.99 last reached on October 12, 2023.
• This book has been $1.99 8 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $14.99 last reached on August 12, 2024.
• This book has been $14.99 27 times since we started tracking it.

• Literature & Fiction

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 465 Pages
• File Size: 5,465 KB