One year after the death of his beloved musician father, 13-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices that belong to the things in his house. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous. Benny tries to ignore them, but the voices follow him outside the house, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library. There, Benny discovers a strange new world. He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many. And he meets his very own Book --- a talking thing --- who narrates Benny’s life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter.

A writer named Ruth discovers on a British Columbia beach a bag that contains the diary of Nao, a 16-year-old Japanese girl. The diary begins as Nao’s attempt to tell the story of her 104-year-old great-grandmother becomes instead a chronicle of Nao’s feelings of ostracism among family and schoolmates. This challenging novel combines Japanese mythology, quantum physics and the 2011 tsunami into a meditation on the vagaries of fate.