A Story Somewhere in Time

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao decides that there is only one way to escape her profound loneliness and the cruel bullying from her classmates. But before ending it all, she plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who lived for more than a century. The diary is Nao's only solace—and it will end up touching lives in ways she can hardly imagine.

On the other side of the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of objects washed ashore inside a Hello Kitty lunch box—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is drawn into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and propelled forward toward her own future.

Filled with Ozeki's characteristic humor and deeply focused on the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Story Somewhere in Time is a brilliantly inventive and seductive narrative about our shared humanity and the search for a place we can call home.