TEHRAN – A Persian translation of Japanese-American writer Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel “A Tale for the Time Being” has been published.

Mahdieh Abbaspur is the translator of the book released by Nimaj Publications.

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 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 a way 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 a home.

Ozeki published her debut novel, “My Year of Meats”, in 1998. She followed up with “All Over Creation” in 2003. 

She is married to Canadian land artist Oliver Kellhammer, and the couple divides their time between New York City and Vancouver.

Photo: Front cover of the Persian translation of Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel “A Tale for the Time Being”.

MMS/YAW