A Tale for the Time Being
by Ruth Ozeki · 2013
Buy on AmazonIn 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, she 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. Across the Pacific a novelist living on a remote island discovers artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox and is pulled into Nao's drama and her unknown fate. (Bestseller)
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"A novelist named Ruth finds the diary of a Japanese schoolgirl, washed up in the wake of the tsunami and the Fukushima disaster, on the beach of her island home in British Columbia. Several lives become entangled in a dreamlike way as this exquisitely composed novel unfolds."
NPR Books We Love — 2013 · apps.npr.org
By the Book: Dani Shapiro · nytimes.com