On the Calculation of Volume: Book I

"This is a tricky book to summarise. Basically, an antique book dealer finds herself trapped within a single repeating day and she slowly figures out what she can take from each repeating day and what she cannot. It is a very quiet book that conveys an intense sense of time being lived. I think what we ultimately love about this book is how different it feels from the way we tend to live life now, going about our day with our senses deadened and our fingers scrolling through social media feeds, completely in denial of time as it passes. The whole book is a real antidote to the toxic warping of our sense of time and space."

"And okay, sure, maybe one Nordic septology is plenty for most people, but if you are willing to put Jon Fosse aside for a moment, why not have a look at Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume , a seven-part work of speculative fiction centring on a single, endlessly repeating day: a November 18th that, by the time the first book opens, has already re-run inexplicably 122 times. “Here, the time-loop narrative takes on new and stunning proportions,” reports The New York Times . It won Scandinavia’s biggest literary prize, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, in 2022. The first two books were published in English in the States in November last year and are to released in the UK in April—with swooning endorsements from such literary giants as Karl Ove Knausgård and Hernan Díaz."