Novels That Take Place Over A Single Day

Unusually, the story behind this novel is almost as good as the novel itself. Herbert Clyde Lewis was a less-than-prominent screenwriter with the occasional hit to his name, but spent most of his professional life skipping through bankruptcy, bad tempers and bad luck – the pinnacle of which was that this beautifully concise and melancholic novel from 1937 was only fully appreciated after his death in 1950. Gentleman Overboard sees our main character, a dissatisfied banker named Henry Preston Standish, escaping his domestic life and abandoning his family by taking a long and languorous trip on a steamer to Panama, only to slip and fall into the sea and be left bobbing, waiting for a rescue that may or may not be on its way.

We are then left only with the thoughts of this newly-lonely man, his speculations and ruminations on where it all went right or wrong for him, what might be happening on the boat in his absence, what his family will be thinking. It’s a perfect comedy of embarrassment and ineptitude, but one that asks hard questions of its main character and his actions in leaving his family, making it a true anomaly: a dinky masterpiece bobbing alone in obscurity until it was miraculously reissued last year. As the hours of his new existence slip by and the night threatens, we come to understand the situation Standish finds himself in, in every sense.

This book is an absolute feast! It’s full to the brim with swirling prose, etymologic wordplay, literary references, 90’s music references, and playful wit. Inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses and the Homeric epic The Odyssey (don’t worry, you don’t need to read either of them as homework!), Pleasure Beach spans across one day in Blackpool, 1999. Palmer’s experimental style follows the queer love story of Rachel and Olga, and a third interlocutor, Treesa, whose interconnecting accounts, minds, and voices create a polyphonic texture and chorus-like hum to the text. The prose itself is rich with sensory imagery, chip grease, sea air, and a mesmerising musical soundscape. It’s a truly delightful and whirlwind read!

Following one day in the orbit of the International Space Station (that’s 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets), Orbital traces the daily routine and observations of 6 astronauts. At once a novel of profound intimacy and staggering profundity, Samantha Harvey balances the mundane particulars of meals and sleep schedules with the dizzying and reorienting heights of the cosmos. But, above all, Orbital is a sort of love letter to Earth; documenting a joy and admiration for our Planet, this book acts as a form of resistance.

Ok this is slightly cheating because it is more like 48 hours.

On a plot level, Headshot follows seven head-to-head boxing matches at The Daughters of America Cup in Reno, Nevada, with the novel’s chapters structured by the tournament brackets: starting with eight teen girl boxers and whittling them down knockout-style to a final champion over the course of two days.

But what makes this book go from a “huh, I never knew that about the teen girl boxing world” style experience to truly a transcendent work of fiction is the authorial voice, which hovers over the eight girls in a detached third person, diving into their pasts, their present, their eventual fate, their ticks, their fighting styles, the way they carry themselves, their rich and fraught internal worlds. Through the frame of the boxing match, each girl is thrown into relief against the other leaving their psychologies thoroughly plumbed. In retrospect, the setting is a work of genius. In their mid-to-late teens these girls are at a defining moment in their personalities, and throwing them head-to-head in a high pressure boxing match just adds fuel to that emotional fire.

Howie is the most meticulous character in all fiction – prepare yourself to be very much in his company for the duration of a single lunch hour, during which he describes, diverges from and analyses every single thing that happens, turning this very slight book about not much at all into a hefty tome about basically everything in life, with bonus digressions on staplers, shoelaces, milk spout design and communal toilet etiquette.

Set in the Lake District over the course of one day, it begins with Lori who finds her husband Joe dead in bed when she goes to take up their morning coffee. Instead of informing anyone, she sets out for a walk across the fells on a grey and foggy November day, and looks back on the day-after-day that represents an entire marriage. We follow Lori’s memories as a stream of consciousness, but we become acutely aware of her on a bodily level; her aches and hunger, the desires and regrets that she feels deep in her body. Lori’s thoughts focus on the mundane, the everyday, the small niggles like Joe’s bike cluttering up the hallway, trying to dry the washing in the damp back room and watching the neighbour’s children through the kitchen window with feelings of resentment, longing and disappointment. So often her thoughts come back to the loneliness she feels and the repetitiveness of life, and this is reflected in the way that Arnold’s prose loops around and repeats phrases again and again. I found the style and the language completely captivating; Arnold takes us on a walk where the threat of danger lurks in the thick fog of the fells, and in the corners of the entrapped female mind.

An agonisingly good novella. After Rita is found hanged in the local church, Elena refuses to believe her daughter died of suicide. Hampered by the ebbs and flows of her Parkinson’s disease, Elena embarks on a torturous journey to the other side of Buenos Aires looking for answers. For fans of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and Death in Her Hands.

At risk of sounding like a broken record: Alejandro Zambra is a genius. We’ve been banging about our man for quite sometime now and if you haven’t jumped on the Zambra-wagon yet this is a great place to start, newly republished by Fitzcarraldo Editions. His second, vanishingly short but effortlessly brilliant and witty novella about literature and life set over the course of a single evening as a man waits for his partner to come home, increasingly convinced she may never turn up.

Max Porter has an almost infuriatingly high hit-rate when it comes to emotionally transformative storytelling, and his third novel-ish book is no exception. We join the title character for a few troubled hours across a single luminous night as he takes his rucksack into the gleaming darkness of the woods, leaving behind the home for ‘troubled’ boys where he’s been living. Alternating between bullet-paragraphs and freeform text that crawls across the page in breathless volumes, Porter builds a compassionate portrait of disgruntled and mis-parented youth and, crucially, manages to write about the teenage experience without making it utterly cringeworthy. More than that, in fact – it’s beautiful. Porter really immerses the reader in the mud and weeds of both the storytelling and the nocturnal surroundings.

One of our all time most-recommended novels. Over one day in Dublin, we are introduced to two women at very different stages of life. Ruth is contemplating the struggles in her marriage, and Pen is giddily embarking on her first relationship. Both women are considering love and loss, desire and disappointment and the meaning of it all. Pine has created a truly empathetic novel with these two characters that I wanted to hold onto and embrace.

There is not a word wasted in this book. Vanishingly short but extraordinarily powerful and well observed, Natasha Brown combines novel and prose poetry to follow a day in the life of one woman attending a garden party at her fiancé’s family estate. Imagine precise, near surgical interior life represented in fiction mixed with an analysis of class and race akin to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. FFO Max Porter, Jenny Offill

Caustic and sharply hilarious, this merciless and perfectly formed novelette is one brilliant monologue, the results of a woman’s single appointment with her doctor – expect blazing ruminations on shame, sex and squirrel tails.

In the course of an evening, a mother and son experience wildly different emotional truths as they go about their separate lives: the son, on the eve of his birthday, is waiting for his mother to return from the shops with birthday cake ingredients, while she takes a turn past the travelling funfair to meet a man. Sparse, dark and tense, this is a relationship in microcosm, a beautiful dissection of bigger themes than its pages suggest.

As the text of Rebecca Watson’s debut novel little scratch skids and slides across the page in loose columns denoting different trains of thought almost in real time, it’s tempting to think that such visual experimentation on the page wouldn’t make for much of a story. But the urgency of that real-time framework, and Watson’s knack for conversational wit and wrongheaded internal dialogue positively propel the reader through this deft and quite stressful day-in-the-life of an office worker who is struggling to bury the mental remnants of a sexual assault. It’s a high-wire act – tense, readable, relatable, mundane and electrifying all at once.