As you read Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, you start to wonder: is it a novel, a primer on Japanese pop culture, or an introduction to Zen Buddhism? A novelist on a beach in British Columbia finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox that contains a diary, letters, and an old watch. The diary is written by a suicidal girl in Tokyo who is writing about being bullied at school and about her family, in particular her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun. A Tale for the Time Being is a book of many layers. It is both a fictional narrative and a meditation on the nature of time, death, and what it means to call a place home. If you enjoy your fiction with a sprinkling of magical realism, history, philosophy, or quantum physics (and maybe a few footnotes here and there!), A Tale for the Time Being should definitely end up in your to-read stack.