We’re a little more than halfway through Balle’s hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th. Balle’s riveting project continues to wring ever more fascinating dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal captives. In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara’s world—fellow travelers within November 18th—and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternate civilization? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, and people, and of the functions of language itself–must a social movement have a common language in order to exist? Snatches of conversation, argument, and late-night chatter crowd onto the pages of Tara’s notebooks. Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one—not even Tara, our steady cataloger and cartographer of the endless November day—could have foreseen.

It’s been a while since Tara Selter was all alone in her repeating November day. It’s been even longer since she was one half of a unit called T&T Selter, an antiquarian book dealership she ran with her beloved husband Thomas. Her hazy days of confusion are behind her, and so are her desperate and doomed attempts to reattach herself to linear time. Tara has begun to settle into a new life, with new habits, and new people, and so have the many other time-trapped individuals who have joined her along the way. And yet we can’t help but wonder whether she and her fellow travelers will ever find their way out of a trap so inexplicable and profound—and will they even still want to? In Balle’s hands the time loop becomes a parable of loss, longing, marital loneliness, and our own mortality. With gradual, breathtaking power, Balle deftly explores a series of existential and philosophical questions, and grapples with the form of the novel itself, charging full steam ahead in reinventing and reinvigorating its possibilities. And now we’ve arrived at the thrilling fifth book of Solvej Balle’s septology. “It’s a sensation.” (The New York Times Magazine).

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN FICTION

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025

In the marvelous third installment of Balle’s “astonishing” (The Washington Post) septology, Tara’s November 18th transforms when she discovers that she is no longer alone in her endless autumnal day. For she has met someone who remembers, and who knows as well as she does that “it is autumn, but that we’re not heading into winter. That spring and summer will not follow. That the reds and yellows of the trees are here to stay.” Where Book I and II focused on a single woman’s involuntary journey away from her life and her loved ones and into the chasm of time, Book III brings us back into the realm of companionship, with all its thrills, odd quirks, and a sense of mutual bewilderment at having to relearn how to exist alongside others in a shared reality. And then of course, what of Tara’s husband Thomas, still sitting alone day after day, entirely unawares, in their house in Clarion-sous-Bois, waiting for his wife to return? Blending poetry and philosophical inquiry with rich reflections on our discombobulating times, Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume asks us to consider: What is a single person’s responsibility to humanity and to the preservation of this world?

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2023: TIME, LIT HUB, THE MILLIONS

After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf the new mother, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively buys clothes she can’t afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, Anna forces herself to read and write.

My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms—fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters—to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.