A great, enduring, and much anticipated book by best-selling novelist Ruth Ozeki "A time being is someone who exists within time, which includes you, me, and everyone else who is, has ever been, or will ever be." Nao, a sixteen-year-old girl in Tokyo, has come to the conclusion that there is only one way out of her crushing loneliness and her bullies peers. Nao intends to record the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who lived for more than a century, until she finally puts an end to everything. Nao's sole source of comfort is a diary, which she can hardly comprehend how it will affect people's lives. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a writer who lives on a lonely island and finds a collection of objects that may have been tsunami debris from 2011 washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox. Ruth is dragged into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknowable fate, and forward into her own future as the mystery behind its contents is revealed. A Tale for the Time Being is a marvellously innovative, seductive tale of our shared humanity and the search for home. It is full of Ozeki's trademark humour and is intimately engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth.