2 Novels Set Over Very Memorable Days

Dear readers,

With apologies to Stephen Hawking, anyone who’s ever experienced a root canal or a first kiss knows something about the relativity of time. Who hasn’t felt entire weeks go by like flashcards, or wondered why certain situations (a bad date, a flight delay) seem to open up wormhole portals to eternity?

C’est la vie, of course, unless you are some type of time-lord wizard. But novelists are wizards, or at least magicians, and one of their favorite tricks is to fit whole narrative worlds inside a single day, book-shaped ships squeezed into bottles.

The day itself doesn’t have to be noteworthy or even nominally eventful, which is often the point; think of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, preparing to host her umpteenth plummy soirée, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, whose big score in the gulag is getting an extra bread crust and two bowls of gruel. But watch what a smart writer can do with the neat little nesting dolls of diversion and digression, plot and memory.

The authors in this week’s newsletter take bigger swings, in that the days they build their stories around are so obviously the kind you would circle in red on a calendar. Plot machinery, though, still takes a second seat to character, observation and style. Because the best magic trick, the one that makes sleepless nights and long empty afternoons disappear, doesn’t rest on clever conceits; it just has to be a really good read.

— Leah