Teaser Tuesdays – A Tale For The Time Being

Teaser Tuesday is courtesy of Miz B’s Should Be Reading Blog. Each Tuesday I will post a snippet from a book I’m reading, or just finished reading. The name and author of the book as well a brief synopsis of the book is included.

A Tale For The Time Being
by Ruth Ozeki

From Indiebound:

A brilliant, unforgettable novel from bestselling author Ruth Ozeki—shortlisted for the Booker Prize

“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.

Teaser:

I’m reaching forward through time to touch you . . . you’re reaching back to touch me.

She held the diary to her nose again and sniffed, identifying the smells one by one: the mustiness of an old book tickling her nostrils, the acrid tang of glue and paper, and then something else that she realized must be Nao, bitter like coffee beans and sweetly fruity like shampoo.  She inhaled again, deeply this time, and then put the book – no, not a schoolgirl’s nice pure diary – back on the bedside table, still pondering how best to read this improbable text. Nao claimed to have written it just for her, and while Ruth knew this was absurd, she decided she would go along with the conceit. As the girl’s reader, it was the least she could do.

Let me know what you think of the teaser?   Did it encourage you to put in on your to be read list? or to do some more reasearch?  Are you ready to purchase your own copy? Use one of the links below.

Thanks for playing Teaser Tuesday!