** A NEW YORKER AND PARIS REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR **

It seems so odd to me now, how one can be so unsettled by the improbable. When we know that our entire existence is founded on freak occurrences and improbable coincidences. That we wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for these curious twists of fate.

The first volume of the poetic, page-turning masterpiece about one woman’s fall through the cracks of time.

Tara Selter has slipped out of time.

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.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NORDIC COUNCIL LITERATURE PRIZE

‘A total explosion.’ Nicole Krauss
‘Unforgettable.’ Hernan Daz
‘Breathtaking.’ Chetna Maroo
‘Brilliant.’ Jon McGregor
‘Absolutely marvellous.’ Lauren Groff

Review: ‘What the best novels can do is open up spaces. And she has opened a space in time, and it is absolutely, absolutely incredible. I think it’s a fantastic book.’ — Karl Ove Knausgard

‘Solvej Balle is a prodigious writer who, miraculously, finds the subtlest, most fascinating differences in repetition. You have never read anything like On the Calculation of Volume. This unforgettable novel is a profound meditation on the lonely, untranslatable ways in which each one of us inhabits time-and the tenuous yet indelible traces we leave in the world. Day after day.’ — Hernan Diaz

‘A total explosion; Solvej Balle has blown through to a new dimension of literary exploration.’ — Nicole Krauss

‘I loved it. I found it such a strange and haunting book, given tremendous power by its childlike sense of fable, and the slowly rising sense of true dread; an essential tale in which narrator, and reader, are somehow trapped.’ — Lucy Caldwell

‘A masterpiece of its time.’ Nordic Council Literature Prize Jury

‘The overarching theme of the fragility of the physical and regular world is intellectually thought-provoking, not least in a climate crisis context. And if you surrender to the language, you get an unusual aesthetic experience that triggers questions about literature itself. This is catalytic literature, which not only touches but also moves one forward, emotionally as well as intellectually.’ — Fedja Wierod Borcak Boras Tidning (Sweden)

‘A steady, careful, and deeply disquieting estrangement of a single day, it is impossible to put down.’ — Kate Briggs