Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and Winner of the Nordic Council Prize for Literature, On the Calculation of Volume III is the third volume of the poetic, page-turning European masterpiece about one woman's fall through the cracks of time.
Tara Selter is no longer alone.
Tara Selter has lived the eighteenth of November 1,143 times when she notices a break in the pattern: a man has changed his shirt. The man is Henry Dale, and he remembers all the days that have come before. He knows that time has fallen out of joint. Now they are two of a kind - trapped in the eighteenth of November, but no longer alone.
Together they learn to share their present; their voices grow hoarse recounting their small battles against it and their bewilderment at the disintegrating world. Henry sees things differently to Tara: he does not think that time will put itself back together and he does not think that the future will come around. But he makes her realise that she is no longer the same person she was before this fault in time. And he makes her believe that there may be others to find within it.
A New York Times notable book of 2025
'Absolutely, absolutely incredible.' Karl Ove Knausgård
'Endlessly interesting.' Guardian
'A total explosion.' Nicole Krauss
'Extraordinary.' Daisy Johnson
'Unforgettable.' Hernan Díaz
'Breathtaking.' Chetna Maroo
'Absolutely marvellous.' Lauren Groff
What the best novels can do is open up spaces. And she has opened a space in time, and it is absolutely, absolutely incredible. -- Karl Ove Knausgaard
I found myself completely and breathlessly absorbed in the world Solvej Balle has created. -- Jon McGregor
A multi-part experimental epic . . . a speculative masterwork. ― The Cut
Breathtaking, at times heart-stopping - and totally unexpected. A classic in the making. -- Chetna Maroo
A startling exploration of profound questions about language, human connection, and time. ― New Yorker
I cannot believe how good Balle's writing is, she is a sublime, extraordinary writer and this series is a storm of brilliance. -- Daisy Johnson
Endlessly fascinating, supple, and tenderly human, Balle's masterpiece reaches new heights. ― Publishers Weekly, starred review
Endlessly interesting . . . a profound meditation on love and loneliness, on grief and hope and longing, on the rapacity of human consumption and the ordinary, unthinking mundanity of everyday life, on how we understand the past and anticipate the future. Her sinuous sentences wrap themselves around us, her readers, binding us over and over to 18 November, drawing us deeper and deeper into its ungraspable possibilities. By this third volume, the day no longer belongs exclusively to Tara. It belongs to her three companions - and to us. ― Guardian
Thrilling . . . humming with new possibility. ― Observer
