India, July 10 -- What if stories were written in time than in space as we mostly know it? What would happen to characters caught in time and its murky tick-tock? Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume I, translated from the Danish by Barbara J Haveland tries to answer these questions. Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, this is the first of a three-book series about a woman stuck in a day.

Tara Selter wakes up every morning to the eighteenth of November. She was in Paris to collect antiquarian books that she sells with her husband in the French countryside. She meets friends and her hand is burnt by a heater in a bookshop. She returns to her room in Paris, falls asleep with an ice-pack and opens her eyes not to the...