A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZELONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURETara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.The first volume’s gravitational pull—a force inverse to its constriction—has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects.  As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”

A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth.Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language.And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara’s own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? “It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.” She begins to think of herself as a relic of the past, as something or someone leftover, similar to the little Roman coin she carries around in her pocket, without a purpose or a place.Desperate to recover a sense of herself within time, Tara decides to head north by train in search of winter, but soon she turns south in pursuit of spring, as she tries to grasp on to durational time through seasonal variations. Amazingly, On the Calculation of Volume Book II is all movement and motion—taking us through the European countries of the North and the South, through seasons, and languages—a beautiful travelogue that is also a love letter to our vanishing world. To be continued.

The third volume of the Booker-shortlisted masterpiece about a woman lost in time. WINNER OF THE NORDIC COUNCIL PRIZE'Absolutely, absolutely incredible.' Karl Ove Knausgård'A total explosion.' Nicole Krauss'Extraordinary.' Daisy Johnson'Unforgettable.' Hernan Díaz'Breathtaking.' Chetna Maroo'Absolutely marvellous.' Lauren GroffTara Selter is no longer alone.I have met someone who remembers. Yesterday. That is to say, I met him yesterday. But he remembers yesterday, too. He remembers that we met yesterday.Tara Selter has lived the eighteenth of November 1,143 times when she notices a break in the pattern: a man has changed his shirt. The man is Henry Dale, and he remembers all the days that have come before. He knows that time has fallen out of joint. Now they are two of a kind - trapped in the eighteenth of November, but no longer alone.Together they learn to share their present; their voices grow hoarse recounting their small battles against it and their bewilderment at the disintegrating world. Henry sees things differently to Tara: he does not think that time will put itself back together and he does not think that the future will come around. But he makes her realise that she is no longer the same person she was before this fault in time. And he makes her believe that there may be others to find within it.A New York Times notable book of 2025

** A NEW YORKER, OBSERVER AND PARIS REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR **'Absolutely, absolutely incredible.' Karl Ove Knausgård'A total explosion.' Nicole Krauss'Unforgettable.' Hernan Díaz'Breathtaking.' Chetna Maroo'Brilliant.' Jon McGregor'Absolutely marvellous.' Lauren GroffShortlisted for the International Booker Prize this is the first volume of the poetic, page-turning European masterpiece about one woman's fall through the cracks of time.Tara Selter has slipped out of time.It was clear that the day always returned to its starting point, but that there were also variations. It was not mechanical, there was more to it. It was the same day which kept recurring, but it was not set in stone. Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand - the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband's surprise at seeing her return home unannounced. But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain.As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can't shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there's a way to escape.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURESHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN TRANSLATION PRIZEIn the marvelous third installment of Balle’s “astonishing” (The Washington Post) septology, Tara’s November 18th transforms when she discovers that she is no longer alone in her endless autumnal day. For she has met someone who remembers, and who knows as well as she does that “it is autumn, but that we’re not heading into winter. That spring and summer will not follow. That the reds and yellows of the trees are here to stay. That yesterday doesn’t mean the seventeenth of November, that tomorrow means the eighteenth, and that the nineteenth is a day we may never see.” Where Book I and II focused on a single woman’s involuntary journey away from her life and her loved ones and into the chasm of time, Book III brings us back into the realm of companionship, with all its thrills, odd quirks, and a sense of mutual bewilderment at having to relearn how to exist alongside others in a shared reality. And then of course, what of Tara’s husband Thomas, still sitting alone day after day, entirely unawares, in their house in Clarion-sous-Bois, waiting for his wife to return? Blending poetry and philosophical inquiry with rich reflections on our discombobulating times, Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume asks us to consider: What is a single person’s responsibility to humanity and to the preservation of this world?

It feels as though we have each been walking along our own path in the same forest. And now, we have found our way to a clearing and suddenly we see that we share not only the clearing but the forest too. You think it begins when you meet, but in fact, our stories were already entwined.'Our century's answer to Proust' New York Times 'Astonishing' London Review of Books 'Unforgettable' Hernan Díaz'A speculative masterwork' The CutThe fourth volume of the poetic, page-turning and International Booker shortlisted masterpiece about a woman's fall through the cracks of time.Tara Selter has found a new home. In a sprawling villa on the outskirts of Bremen, Tara Selter is starting to settle into a new kind of eighteenth of November. Her days with Henry, Ralf and Olga revolve around the daily routines of practical chores: gathering provisions, splitting firewood. But one morning, there are five new arrivals at their wrought-iron gate.As more people continue to arrive, their home fills with movement, voices fill the air; a flurry of people asking questions, sharing their eighteenths of November. Slowly, they settle into a new routine and Tara begins to breathe a little easier. Could they create a new world inside the eighteenth of November?

We’re a little more than halfway through Balle’s hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle’s riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara’s world—fellow travelers within November 18th—and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternate civilization? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself–must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara’s notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one—not even Tara, our steady cataloger and cartographer of the endless November day—could have foreseen.

Winner of the Nordic Council Prize for LiteratureThe second volume of the Booker-shortlisted masterpiece about one woman's fall through the cracks of time.'Absolutely, absolutely incredible.' Karl Ove Knausgård'A total explosion.' Nicole Krauss'Unforgettable.' Hernan Díaz'Breathtaking.' Chetna Maroo'Brilliant.' Jon McGregor'Absolutely marvellous.' Lauren GroffTara Selter is building her own year.If I want seasons, I will have to build them myself. If I am to have a future, I will have to build it myself. I put the pieces together, little fragments of season and I write it all down.Tara has been stuck in the 18th of November for over a year's worth of days. She still wakes up to the same newspapers, and the same blank faces when she explains that she has seen this all before. Until one morning, she boards a train and finds herself in a new day. It is still the eighteenth of November, but the faces are different, the weather is colder.She realises that she has found a way out of her endless autumn. By moving across Europe rather than through time, she can collect the ingredients for the seasons: the thin film of ice on puddles, the fresh spring breeze, the blazing summer sun. As she travels, she begins to hope for a new future, one that will run in parallel to the eighteenth of November, one that she must build for herself.'How on earth did this book come into being? It's like it has always been here in this world with us, like one feels about the best art.' Sheila Heti

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZELONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURETara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.”)Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.The first volume’s gravitational pull—a force inverse to its constriction—has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects.  As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”

A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth.Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures. Within this new reality, our senses and the tactility of things grows heightened: sounds, smells, sights, objects come suddenly alive, as if the world had begun whispering to us in a new language.And yet as the world announces itself anew, Tara’s own sense of self is eroding, making her wonder just which bits of her are really left intact? “It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.” She begins to think of herself as a relic of the past, as something or someone leftover, similar to the little Roman coin she carries around in her pocket, without a purpose or a place.Desperate to recover a sense of herself within time, Tara decides to head north by train in search of winter, but soon she turns south in pursuit of spring, as she tries to grasp on to durational time through seasonal variations. Amazingly, On the Calculation of Volume Book II is all movement and motion—taking us through the European countries of the North and the South, through seasons, and languages—a beautiful travelogue that is also a love letter to our vanishing world. To be continued.

The third volume of the Booker-shortlisted masterpiece about a woman lost in time. WINNER OF THE NORDIC COUNCIL PRIZE'Absolutely, absolutely incredible.' Karl Ove Knausgård'A total explosion.' Nicole Krauss'Extraordinary.' Daisy Johnson'Unforgettable.' Hernan Díaz'Breathtaking.' Chetna Maroo'Absolutely marvellous.' Lauren GroffTara Selter is no longer alone.I have met someone who remembers. Yesterday. That is to say, I met him yesterday. But he remembers yesterday, too. He remembers that we met yesterday.Tara Selter has lived the eighteenth of November 1,143 times when she notices a break in the pattern: a man has changed his shirt. The man is Henry Dale, and he remembers all the days that have come before. He knows that time has fallen out of joint. Now they are two of a kind - trapped in the eighteenth of November, but no longer alone.Together they learn to share their present; their voices grow hoarse recounting their small battles against it and their bewilderment at the disintegrating world. Henry sees things differently to Tara: he does not think that time will put itself back together and he does not think that the future will come around. But he makes her realise that she is no longer the same person she was before this fault in time. And he makes her believe that there may be others to find within it.A New York Times notable book of 2025

** A NEW YORKER, OBSERVER AND PARIS REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR **'Absolutely, absolutely incredible.' Karl Ove Knausgård'A total explosion.' Nicole Krauss'Unforgettable.' Hernan Díaz'Breathtaking.' Chetna Maroo'Brilliant.' Jon McGregor'Absolutely marvellous.' Lauren GroffShortlisted for the International Booker Prize this is the first volume of the poetic, page-turning European masterpiece about one woman's fall through the cracks of time.Tara Selter has slipped out of time.It was clear that the day always returned to its starting point, but that there were also variations. It was not mechanical, there was more to it. It was the same day which kept recurring, but it was not set in stone. Every morning, she wakes up to the 18th of November. She no longer expects to wake up to the 19th of November, and she no longer remembers the 17th of November as if it were yesterday.She comes to know the shape of the day like the back of her hand - the grey morning light in her Paris hotel; the moment a blackbird breaks into song; her husband's surprise at seeing her return home unannounced. But for everyone around her, this day is lived for the first and only time. They do not remember the other 18ths of November, and they do not believe her when she tries to explain.As Tara approaches her 365th 18th of November, she can't shake the feeling that somewhere underneath the surface of this day, there's a way to escape.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURESHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN FICTIONSHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN TRANSLATION PRIZEIn the marvelous third installment of Balle’s “astonishing” (The Washington Post) septology, Tara’s November 18th transforms when she discovers that she is no longer alone in her endless autumnal day. For she has met someone who remembers, and who knows as well as she does that “it is autumn, but that we’re not heading into winter. That spring and summer will not follow. That the reds and yellows of the trees are here to stay. That yesterday doesn’t mean the seventeenth of November, that tomorrow means the eighteenth, and that the nineteenth is a day we may never see.” Where Book I and II focused on a single woman’s involuntary journey away from her life and her loved ones and into the chasm of time, Book III brings us back into the realm of companionship, with all its thrills, odd quirks, and a sense of mutual bewilderment at having to relearn how to exist alongside others in a shared reality. And then of course, what of Tara’s husband Thomas, still sitting alone day after day, entirely unawares, in their house in Clarion-sous-Bois, waiting for his wife to return? Blending poetry and philosophical inquiry with rich reflections on our discombobulating times, Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume asks us to consider: What is a single person’s responsibility to humanity and to the preservation of this world?

It feels as though we have each been walking along our own path in the same forest. And now, we have found our way to a clearing and suddenly we see that we share not only the clearing but the forest too. You think it begins when you meet, but in fact, our stories were already entwined.'Our century's answer to Proust' New York Times 'Astonishing' London Review of Books 'Unforgettable' Hernan Díaz'A speculative masterwork' The CutThe fourth volume of the poetic, page-turning and International Booker shortlisted masterpiece about a woman's fall through the cracks of time.Tara Selter has found a new home. In a sprawling villa on the outskirts of Bremen, Tara Selter is starting to settle into a new kind of eighteenth of November. Her days with Henry, Ralf and Olga revolve around the daily routines of practical chores: gathering provisions, splitting firewood. But one morning, there are five new arrivals at their wrought-iron gate.As more people continue to arrive, their home fills with movement, voices fill the air; a flurry of people asking questions, sharing their eighteenths of November. Slowly, they settle into a new routine and Tara begins to breathe a little easier. Could they create a new world inside the eighteenth of November?

We’re a little more than halfway through Balle’s hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle’s riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara’s world—fellow travelers within November 18th—and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternate civilization? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel in the Book of Genesis, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, of people, and of the functions of language itself–must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara’s notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one—not even Tara, our steady cataloger and cartographer of the endless November day—could have foreseen.

Winner of the Nordic Council Prize for LiteratureThe second volume of the Booker-shortlisted masterpiece about one woman's fall through the cracks of time.'Absolutely, absolutely incredible.' Karl Ove Knausgård'A total explosion.' Nicole Krauss'Unforgettable.' Hernan Díaz'Breathtaking.' Chetna Maroo'Brilliant.' Jon McGregor'Absolutely marvellous.' Lauren GroffTara Selter is building her own year.If I want seasons, I will have to build them myself. If I am to have a future, I will have to build it myself. I put the pieces together, little fragments of season and I write it all down.Tara has been stuck in the 18th of November for over a year's worth of days. She still wakes up to the same newspapers, and the same blank faces when she explains that she has seen this all before. Until one morning, she boards a train and finds herself in a new day. It is still the eighteenth of November, but the faces are different, the weather is colder.She realises that she has found a way out of her endless autumn. By moving across Europe rather than through time, she can collect the ingredients for the seasons: the thin film of ice on puddles, the fresh spring breeze, the blazing summer sun. As she travels, she begins to hope for a new future, one that will run in parallel to the eighteenth of November, one that she must build for herself.'How on earth did this book come into being? It's like it has always been here in this world with us, like one feels about the best art.' Sheila Heti