'Fantastic.' Karl Ove Knausgård
'Miraculous.' The Cut
'Unforgettable.' Hernan Díaz
'Wonderful.' K Patrick
'A total explosion: a new dimension.' Nicole Krauss
The second volume of the landmark European masterpiece about a woman lost in time.
I was sure that through careful listening you could solve any problem that might arise. If you really listened. The great questions in life. Everything.
Tara Selter is searching for a way back into time.
A year has passed, but Tara still wakes up to the same newspapers, and the same blank faces when she explains that she has seen this all before. Until one morning, she boards a train and finds herself in a new day. It is still the eighteenth of November, but the faces are different, the weather is colder.
She realises that she has found a way out of her endless autumn. By moving across Europe rather than through time, she can collect the ingredients for the seasons: the thin film of ice on puddles, the fresh spring breeze, the blazing summer sun. As she travels, she begins to hope for a new future, one that will run in parallel to the eighteenth of November, one that she must build for herself.
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 Knausgård
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
A masterpiece of its time. -- Nordic Council Literature Prize Jury
