What connects us through time and space is at the heart of A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. It connects the story of a young Japanese girl told through her diary and a Japanese-American novelist reading that diary on the isolated Cortes Island of British Columbia.
Both are outsiders - the girl who wrote the diary spent her formative years in the States so she's culturally more American than Japanese. The novelist is from the big city and living on a remote island.
